D+5

Overnight, some of the changes have been done – about two-thirds; but the developers think that the English part of the site is complete. Sorry, but a lot of the changes have not been made. I create a second table, remove all the changes that were made correctly, and send back two pages of changes that were not done. I elaborate on what I mean using highlighters and some explanatory text.

The developers retaliate, telling my Chinese is not good and needs to be redone.  I call on my Chinese translator, who fixes my lexicon overnight for me.

Why can I never get hold of these developers during the working day? The time difference is only 2 hours  - and yet they only seem to start working on my project around 5pm – which is 7pm for me.  The Account Manager informs me that the engineer thought that the website was looking reasonable, so he took a day off. *#*$#*!  We’re now 5 days late, a long way from finished, the e-commerce functionality has not been tested, and the Chinese side of the site is still a mess – and he takes a day off!

I finally get hold of the Account Manager, who says he’ll appoint another engineer – but the replacement is worse than the original. He doesn’t know Wordpress either and he would be starting back at the beginning. He doesn’t even bother replying to my emails. He does no work on the site at all today.

It seems the original engineer also took the development site offline while he was away for the day, so my Chinese translator, whom I’d asked to proof-read the site, couldn’t access it. She had to do it in the evening, when the engineer logged on to do a little after-hours work. Is he developing my website from his laptop??