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Budget Allocation Principles

from response to email message
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The companies have, sometimes, a very peculiar principles of allocating their budgets. Lexis-Nexis (which makes a good buck by tricking lawyers out of their dishonest earnings by selling them fresh public records information, which later will be free - and outdated, of course...) would, without a blink, fly me to Washington, D.C. to a pointless client meeting - for nearly a kilobuck for a round trip - and yet I had to wait for almost a year to get DreamWeaver 4 upgrade for a lousy $400.
Procter & Gamble - this is the matter of my professional pride - paid nearly 90 grand to Mycom for a SINGLE web page (OK, that was a portal page, fairly complex, etc, but, c'mon...) I was developing for them for seven months full-time, and they were happy kittens on a catnip, kept coming back with "changes" and "improvements" twice a week at least, at the straight rate of $75/h (I should've called Guinness Book Of Records, claiming the rights to the most expensive web page ever, never mind rather meager portion of that money, actually making it to my paycheck). After the end of the next stage of P&G project Mycom closed my position, for it was decided, that they don't need a senior web designer anymore. I never understood the logic behind that event. I still don't.
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I am typing this on a 5+ year old 700MHz Gateway PC with 128MB of RAM. It takes it 30min to come alive in the morning, and about 4min to reallocate virtual memory, when I switch from DreamWeaver to ImageReady. I switch often. I think, I can safely indicate 2X the hourly rate in the salary history section of my resume for this job, since half of my time at work I just wait for the box to response to my mouse movements.
And I am not the only one here...

Well, Photoshop is finally up. Time to go to a meeting.

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