I need to vent quickly - wedding is Saturday.
My wedding is a budget wedding -- everyone knows this -- so we have bartered services a long the way to make it NOT look like a budget wedding.
Anyway, last May I met with a "friend" of mine who agreed to design our wedding programs and other print items for us. At that time I made a list of everything I wanted made and asked her to give me a price. She told me she didnt know what to charge because we are "friends" so to consider it a gift and just give her whatever I felt comfortable paying her.
In the meantime - in addition to designing as much on my own as possible so that all she has to do is "polish" the look of everything, I have edited a number of items for her for free (I am a professional writer). My mom has purchased outfits for my friend's daughter as a thank you for helping with the wedding. I am hosting her birthday party at a local restaurant next mont (invitations have gone out already), she has a shoe fetish so my mom and I were planning to present her with these awesome pumps at my rehearsal dinner on Friday night AND I was still was planning to give her $250 for her designs.
Well yesterday, I arrive at work and she tells me she is charging me $450 for the designs - half of the stuff she was working on, she hasn't even started on, and she sent my programs to the printer to be mass duplicated -- when I went to look at the proof of her final product, there were typos galore, the pictures are all pixelated, the text are varying font sizes and half of my fiance's head is cut off on the cover of the program.
My wedding is in three days --- I'm so pissed right now I can't even think straight!