January 24, 2018: Filing an Unpaid Wage Report

Wednesday. This morning was mostly normal work.

Found out that the City of Peekskill lost our paperwork for getting our house inspected, which explains why we’ve been waiting for weeks without hearing anything.  We had even followed up with them and they had confirmed that they had had it weeks ago.  And at that time, they didn’t confirm until nearly five days after USPS had reported that they had received everything.

But at least now things are moving forward, they know that they screwed up and they are going to rush us through, now.  So things should happen tomorrow.

Today, for the first time ever, I got to spend a bit of my time filling out a report with the state for an employer not paying my wages.  All kinds of fun there.  This is, as you can imagine, very stressful.  In total, it is 4.5 months of unpaid wages that have to be claimed.  It’s a hugely impactful amount of money.

Tonight we watched the second Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, as a family.  The girls are really liking getting to see the movies. They have been so into the books now for so long.  Harry Potter has really gotten them into literature like nothing else had before.

After we finished the movie, Dominica went to bed and the girls and I had our normal bedtime Harry Potter reading time and we ended up reading four chapters of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince so that we could finish the book tonight.  Lots of really intense stuff at this point.

January 23, 2018: Only One in the Meeting

Tuesday. So after my meeting on Sunday to find out why I was not getting paid for over four months of work, we were supposed to have a meeting today with everyone involved to go over the situation.  But, as expected, no one that was supposed to attend the meeting showed up.  Same pattern as always, it is just a stalling tactic.  This is a perfect example of how everything that they are claiming is exactly the opposite of reality.  There is no question that it has been a scam all along and they never had any possibility of running  a real business.  No one can even be bothered to show up to work.

So after calling, emailing, texting all day and finding out that not only did they not show up for the meeting, but had shot off their phones, too, there was nothing to do but put in a call to the state and discuss my legal options for dealing with months of missing pay.  The conversation with the state went really well and they felt, at least by the quick conversation on the phone, that it was an open and shut case and that there was zero grounds for them not paying and that they would have no problem collecting from a company, even one located overseas.  The state did recommend to me to file a report with the Department of Homeland Security about the situation, as it was an obvious scam and they had admitted to me that they had set the whole thing up with the intention of never paying me from the beginning (a surprising thing to have admitted) which means that they admitted to at least a portion of the situation having been an attempt to defraud from day one.

So that was my day, mostly dealing with stress and problems with the job.  At least we have closure that it is absolutely over and done as far as the work goes.  But, now dealing with getting paid is already turned into a nightmare and it has only just begun.  At least the state feeling super confident that there was nothing at all to worry about is a good step in the right direction.

This evening we decided to start watching the Harry Potter movies on HBO Go together as a family.  We are starting at the beginning and going to work our way through them since they are all available currently on HBO Go.  So tonight was Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone.

The girls were very much not impressed by how inaccurate and sloppy the movie was and the ridiculous amount of stuff that was cut out of the book to make it all fit.  Going back now, having just read the books, the movie feels so incredibly rushed and does not convey any of the way that the book makes you feel.  The focus is on so much goofy action, Jason and the Argonauts style special effects, and scenery that the characters and the mood are totally lost.

After our movie, it was time for reading.  The girls and I are still working our way through the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  They are loving it.  We’ve got only a handful of chapters left to read in it after tonight.

January 22, 2018: Getting Ready for Marketing

Monday. Just normal work today.  Yesterday’s meeting and waiting for a follow up meeting tomorrow (which I strongly suspected is made up and no one plans to attend, as per form) makes today a generally stressful day.  No word on progress on the house yet, either.

I put in a full day preparing for marketing stuff to do tomorrow, continuing on the work that I was doing since Friday.  I’ve learned so much about what is currently going on in Wyoming and Niagara Counties, back home, this week.  It was a bit nostalgic researching street by street back home.

That was the bulk of my day.  I worked into the evening on that.  Dominica has been watching The Facts of Life on her own when she has time.  When together, we’ve been slowly working our way through The Thin Blue Line, the 1990’s BBC sitcom that we watch together every few years.

January 21, 2018: The Meeting

Sunday. We took it relatively easy today.  I worked most of the day on collecting marketing research as I have been working on for the last few days.  I did that for the morning.  Then this afternoon Dominica and I watched some Thin Blue Line which we had been watching for the last few days after having wrapped up watching Grace & Favour.

This evening I ended up driving down to Irving to have a long many hour meeting discussing why I had not been paid for the last four months and what was going to be done about it.  I’ve been demanding my pay for the last couple weeks and have now learned, not that anyone is entirely surprised, that the entire job that I was given starting at the end of September was a complete and utter scam.  What’s amazing, though, is the completely openness with which the scam was admitted.  Apparently, working for Indian nationals operating out of Qatar has given them the impression that they operate with impunity and have absolutely no fear of the US legal system or the government.

It was an oddly friendly, and extremely adversarial, discussion.  He ended the night by stalling and saying that more people needed to be in the discussion and that we’d had a meeting with them on Tuesday to go over it.  But he made it clear that he felt that US employment law and both his legal and ethical obligations were irrelevant and that he was untouchable and no matter what the law said, he felt he had no reason to have to pay my salary, ever after being happy to employ me for nearly half of a year – not to mention regularly raving about the unbelievable results that I was producing.

We ended up having dinner and drinks at Olive Garden before I went back home.  Bottom line, just as we feared since the beginning, the project in Qatar was a scam.  The fact that the project didn’t make sense, all of the managers were bluffing and had zero technical skills (not to mention no management skills), and couldn’t bring themselves to do the slightest bit of work were red flags, but given so many other things we were unable to really determine how much of a scam things were.  Given the timing, the existing situation, the holidays, and so forth, we had decided to give it a try even knowing that there was a good chance that we would get scammed.  So we aren’t surprised in the least and, realistically, we’ve been 100% certain that it was a scam since early December, but to protect other people and because of the holidays, we rode it out until now as there was really nothing to lose by doing so at that point.

At least we know now, for sure.  No questions whatsoever.

One thing that constantly amazes me, though, and I ever said this directly to them – that if they believe that they can go back in time and decide long after the fact that I have not been an employee all of this time, and since they had declined to provide development environments and all work was done on another company’s servers and platforms, and nothing had ever been owned by them, and as I had done the bulk of the design myself: that left me as the key copyright holder, the physical owner of all of the work done, and under no NDA or similar contract.  Meaning either I was an employee and they owe me a lot of money, or I wasn’t an employee and all of the work that they’ve been paying other people for actually belongs completely to me and I am under zero obligation to not sell it anywhere that I want as they didn’t do any of the design, didn’t have me agree to any limitations, and I paid for the system to be made without them actually being involved.  Which is a bit insane.