Right after college I was having trouble finding work and ended up being an intern for a small nonprofit.
I was young, dumb, and really believed in their cause I was doing the work of a full-on employee writing grants for minimum wage and part-time hours, I did a lot of extra things for this company unpaid as well. Instead of this being rewarded my boss tried to dispute the number of hours I worked and claimed he would only pay me for ” some of them”. I reminded him that was in fact illegal and he did end up paying me for all of them but I got laid off not long after.
Cut to seven years later I just finished my graduate degree. My old boss calls me, he claims things are different now he has a ten million dollar budget and a full-on department for what I was doing by myself before. He said he was looking to fill a full-time grant writer position at a competitive rate. I was pretty certain he was full of shit but told him to email me the details. Well, he then downgraded his offer to consulting on some grants which was fine by me I already currently do consulting with other nonprofits and could stand to pick up a couple more projects. He says he will send me my contract.
He starts spamming me with emails about various grants demanding I work on them immediately, asking when im coming in. Basically acting like I already work for him I remind him since he hasn't sent me the contract I don't work for him yet. He continues to send me grants claiming he will send my contract ” later”
I've ignored all his emails since. I suspect since he was super behind on all of these grant proposals he thought he could string me along and squeeze some free labor out of me to get caught up. I look forward to him crashing and burning when he realizes his plan failed.