I have a confession to make: I make mistakes.

I don’t think I’m alone in that either. We all make mistakes and there really isn’t anything one can do about it except do the best you can to fix it and then move on.

Anyway, here’s what happened in this case. I took a job to write an eBook for someone, got the necessary source material and started to work. In hindsight I think I should have looked more deeply into some of the source material that came with it but that doesn’t matter at this point.

I was about half finished when things went wrong, and my production fell off to near zero. It can be argued it wasn’t entirely my fault. I had the following things to deal with:

I just discovered that my father (who has cancer) had been called into the doctor’s office and told that his chemotherapy wasn’t working. They told my parents they could either continue the therapy and give him a possibility of a slightly extended life, or just manage the pain and other symptoms for a higher quality of life. They had to decide before they left the office.

My partner’s son got in a fight on school grounds and he may be expelled. There’s a hearing coming up this week. The kicker is that the person he fought not only provoked the fight but has been actively trying to start this fight and get him expelled for a couple of weeks now.

In the meantime his father is back visiting us from a military deployment overseas so he can see his children. He needs to see them, but his presence in the house is adding to everyone’s stress level.

Given the situation and all the stress it may not be surprising that my work fell off for some days. The important thing to remember is that none of this was the buyer’s fault.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the buyer decided to cancel the project.

There are a couple of ways I could have chosen to respond to this. The site in question would have allowed me to at least hold up the cancellation, and possibly get into some sort of argument with the buyer.

I didn’t.

Instead I went along with his request for cancellation. The reason I did was that the buyer had obviously lost faith in me, and nothing I would do was going to bring that faith back. The best thing for everyone, myself and the buyer was to get some distance and close the book on the project. The part of the project that I did was good work and I’m not going to move it into my portfolio as I would with unpaid work.

So, where’s the lesson here?

Well the first lesson is communication. There wasn’t as much as there probably should have been and it showed. That lesson is hard to learn and sometimes we have to re-learn it more than once. The second lesson is keep it clean and stay professional. Even when you cannot complete the job don’t waste the other person’s time.

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• Don’t Be a Jerk