From: Flick Harrison (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jun 12 2009 - 11:31:50 PDT
I think you need to read "how to win friends and influence people."
Lots of anecdotes and tips relating to this kind of situation, though
always from the salesman's perspective, of course.
;-)
Someone who hands you an 11-year-old $5000 invoice without
communicating beforehand - you might want to check consumer law in
your area and see if it's even legally valid. An 11-year contract
without a signature? Who can remember what terms were agreed verbally
that long ago? Is the same staff person even employed there, to vouch
for it? Did they flub up by not advising you of the charges? Maybe
the BBB or something. As you said, the paperwork was never put in
your hands. Maybe you should hand THEM a bill for $5000 for negative
rental? It was in the paperwork, they should have read it, ha ha.
On the other hand, at a restaurant, there's an assumed contract when
you order food - of course you're not just ASKING for the food, you're
ordering it for the price on the menu, even if no one has handed you a
menu yet. That probably applies in this situation, unfortunately for
you.
Those are the win/lose arguments - is there a third argument, where
everybody wins? I.e. you don't pay the bill and the lab gets
something beneficial to them?
But for $5000, you could re-produce the darn thing from scratch,
probably, never mind the transfer.
I would figure out the options of re-producing the work elsewhere, and
definitely use that as a bottom-line figure. Why pay more than that?
You still don't even know what kind of shape the print is in - I
assume their $5000 storage is solid-gold, but I doubt they take
responsibility, for instance, for the full cost of re-shooting the
project if there's a problem with their storage conditions. On the
other hand, if you'd kept the thing in your closet for 11 years, it
might be a faded, decaying mess as well, so they have probably saved
you a lot of cost and trouble.
But if you can do it elsewhere, for cheaper, you might want to tell
them to dump the print, and stop accruing charges.
I guess I'd better check up on that really old negative I have sitting
at Gastown Labs - I wonder if they still exist...
* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com
* FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553
* MYSPACE: http://myspace.com/flickharrison
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