[Rick Lee]

If I were allowed to fire clients, this city gov't. agency would top my list. This is the contract I won about a year ago after a competitive bid, not because we had the best price, but because I was the only person who correctly filled out their affirmative action form and filed it with the city before submitting my bid. They had to award to us. It then took months of legal wrangling because of their contract language and my own company's dragging their feet because our top legal eagles don't usually bother with such small contracts. Nevertheless, we then customized a good deal for them at a slight discount and they were very happy.

Last week the city wanted to make a few changes. They wanted to write in a two year extension (whew!) and require us to notify them within two days if we lost our insurance (WTF?). It was previously 30 days. This took countless emails between my legal dept., boss, COO and the city's contract folks. The city wouldn't budge on a single thing and said "sign it as is or we cancel." So we signed.

Today they said they want to cancel because we did not properly notify their contract folks about enhancements and improvements we made to the services they buy. The end users were trained on this months ago and have been happy with it. We really only combined the services into one platform, requiring one logon instead of two and changed the name. The city wants to cancel over this. They say we're in breach.

Here's a perfect example of a gov't. agency 1) not getting the best bang for the taxpayers' buck because of affirmative action and 2) canceling a service they say they need and are happy with because we improved it (at no additional cost) and didn't think it warranted a contract amendment. And they did this after the whole rigamaroll of their own amendment request. This ain't worth my time. And if I were a taxpayer of this city, I'd be steaming mad about it. If I leave this job anytime soon, I'd be tempted to tell a local reporter about this.