Let me start this out by saying I am in no position to turn work away. In fact, are small businesses ever in a position to do that? I think a lot of smart, sane people would advise that I should be taking everything. Everything I can to get upright, and to get stable but gluing myself to this desk reworking this proposal for the 90th time just wasn't sitting well with me.

It's not that I had other things I wanted to do right at that moment, or that I was sick of working on it. To the contrary I've been known to doggedly work at projects for hours and hours at a time until my eyeballs feel as though they might never go back to normal. This wasn't anything like that.

This was more that I knew this particular client wasn't going to like version 90 of this proposal either. Why? Because they wanted something for a price I wasn't willing to give. They wanted me to return with a quote that just wasn't going to happen. So I shave a deliverable here and there. I tell them that their team has to help me do some things. I tell them that we'll just do one thing at a time. They still want the whole kit and kaboodle for the price they want.

I feel like telling them that I stroll through Neiman Marcus all the time with the same idea. Instead I tell them I'll take a look again.

Eventually I realize that we probably can't work together. This is really scary because I'm pretty sure that they are going to tell the whole world that I have an evil plan to...... make money. Or that I'm unaccommodating. Unhelpful. My other alternative was to take a huge hit on the project which I can't do and I wondered how far I should go to reach an agreement? 90 proposals? 100?

Then I remember back when I wanted to be platinum blonde. My hair is nearly black. I went to a great salon in Las Vegas and after about half an hour of talking to me and brushing my hair, they stylist tells me "I won't do it". I was livid. "I don't think you know what kind of upkeep this is going to involve". I told him I knew just fine and just make it happen. No stylist had ever told me that they simply wouldn't provide what I asked for. I stormed out and vowed to never go to such an "awful salon" again and found a salon that happily took 7 hours and $350 to make me platinum blonde.

The short ending to this story is that my hair had to be cut off very short due to bleach damage and I spent hundreds of dollars keeping it up. I felt like sending a fruit basket to that first stylist for 1) telling me no to something he knew wouldn't work and 2) teaching me to say no to people that I am potentially being paid by.

I don't even speak to the salon that made me blonde.