One of the educational publishing houses I work with here from time to time - one of the biggest ones in China - asked me to do some work for them this week.
Well, they sent me an e-mail on Tuesday evening. They wanted the work returned by lunchtime the next day. There was no reference to the fee payable.
It was copy for a new promotional brochure. The work asked of me was described as mere "checking", a simple proof-reading/polishing kind of deal. In fact, the text was somewhere beyond Chinglish, just risible garbage, and would have required very substantial re-writing.
Now I could have (as most people in this business, I fear, would have done) run the thing through SpellCheck and GrammarCheck on Word, and tidied up the more egregious errors in half an hour or so. But, really, what would have been the point? I doubt if they would have been willing to pay me much more than 100 RMB, and it's really not worth firing up my computer for such a paltry sum.
In fact, since I went to bed at dawn, and didn't get up until noon yesterday, I had pretty much missed their 'deadline' anyway. So, I had an easy way to decline the job. But I get so incensed about this ridiculous last-minutism and the incessant penny-pinching of these publishers that I couldn't let this incident pass. In my e-mail reply today, I noted heavily: "You really need to employ a professional (native English speaker) copy writer for this kind of work; but you are evidently not prepared to pay for one."
Can you hear my teeth grinding?
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