CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Done-ish
A brief detour. A little ridiculousness. Just roll with it.
Before we move forward, I need to take this small detour.
This one’s different. It’s not about betrayal or trauma. It’s not even about healing, not directly. It’s about something subtler: professional absurdity. The kind that sneaks up quietly, even in trusted circles. The kind that reveals how peace isn’t just something you fight for in relationships — sometimes you have to fight for it in your inbox.
So if you’ve ever freelanced, subcontracted, or just tried to finish a simple project with a client who stopped replying — this one’s for you. If not, feel free to skim ahead. What follows is part workplace memoir, part therapeutic keystroking. Because yes… sometimes even in a book about covenant, love, and healing, the circus still finds a way in.
Some jobs end when the shoot wraps. Others when the check clears.
This one refused to end at all.
What should’ve been a simple delivery has turned into a 17-month saga of ghosting, missed signals, and one near-dead hard drive.
This is freelance.
This is ridiculousness.
This is a story about a project that should’ve been finished—wrapped, delivered, crossed off the list—but instead, it stayed stuck in that maddening in-between. Not done. Just… done-ish. And those of you who work directly with clients in the freelance world — you’ll get it. If you’re in a steady staff position, you might find this amusing too. Sure, you’ve got meetings-that-should’ve-been-emails, performance reviews, and maybe a boss who seems a little lost… but the kind of frustration we freelancers deal with when working directly with customers? Sometimes it’s in a league of its own.
Don’t get me wrong — I love my clients and always go the extra mile for them. I was even told that very thing today by a long-standing client — someone I’ve known and worked with for years across projects ranging from television to medical media. (Let’s just say he’s a frontline ER doc who’s also built a significant media brand. You may know the one.) He told me he’s ready to move all of his social media content over to me, leaving behind the large Chicago firm he’s been using, because, in his words, I actually care. I go the extra distance.
But sometimes… sometimes, ridiculousness happens.
I started using that term — ridiculousness — back in 1998, after seeing (several times) a short film called Circus Redickuless. It was directed by Phillip Glau, a fellow doc filmmaker I kept bumping into on the festival circuit in ’98 and ’99. We both had projects out at the time (mine was Band), and we ended up screening at a lot of the same places: SXSW, New York Independent Film Festival, New York Underground, IFFM and a few others I can’t even remember. We became kind-of friends, the way filmmakers do when their work keeps getting booked into the same blocks.
Circus Redickuless was about a traveling punk circus — no real talent, just chaotic absurdity embraced with both arms. And it stuck with me. To this day, whenever something in my professional life veers into “how is this even real?” territory, I quietly think: ah, Circus Ridickuless.
And right now, with a client/friend, that’s exactly where I’ve found myself.
Freelancers will get this. Sometimes, even from within your own circle, absurdity creeps in.
It helps to write about these moments—not just to vent, but to make sense of them. To move through them. It’s a bit like EMDR therapy, where you revisit a stressful memory while stimulating both sides of the brain. Left side. Right side. Process and release.
In this case, my therapy tool of choice is the keyboard.
That’s what this is for me. Writing it down, keystroking back and forth across the keys with both hands, left-brain/right-brain, I start to get a clearer view of the circus. And even though yes, it is kind of my circus and kind of my monkeys, I can shake my head, close the tent flap, and move on.
This all started in February 2024, a one-off, one-day shoot came up.
It was pretty straightforward — all outdoors, hot, and spread out, with lots of moving parts. We had discussed payment beforehand, and I billed specifically below the normal rate. We were friends, colleagues, supporting each other. I gave a built-in margin, you know… helping out.
So, when did the ridiculousness start?
Two weeks later — when the promised payment didn’t come.
That’s not entirely unusual in this line of work, but then it didn’t come a month later either. Or two months. Or four. It came nine whopping months later.
Literally: a stranger could’ve conceived and delivered a whole human child in the time it took my colleague to pay me for that one hot, strung-out shoot day.
Of course, there were reasons and excuses the entire gestation period. I stayed kind, stayed on top of it. But by the last trimester, I had pretty much given up. I was preparing to write it off as a loss.
And then, one day out of the blue, before the end of the year, a check arrived.
No note. Just money.
Situation over.
Done and done.
The only thing that wasn’t? The footage.
Because I run a meticulous cold-store archival system, the footage had already been deep-archived to a dedicated HDD — not just sitting on a random CFexpress card. It had also briefly existed on my working media array, but once the job was offloaded and checked, that array was wiped. Standard procedure. And no archive drive is older than five years. Once a drive ages out, the data moves to a new one and the old one goes on eBay.
I had no idea the project was still in the works, I had been ghosted.
Clients do that.
Sometimes friends do too.
You roll with it.
I figured if the footage was needed, an ask would come. It was safe.
So yeah, I was pretty much done and done.
Or so I thought…
Little did I know, Circus Ridickuless was just getting started.
Forget the previous payment delay, that was nothing. That was act one. That was Glau’s Chicken John playing ringmaster to a half-sedated audience at a nursing home, shouting into the void while someone in the back row nodded off during a failed fire-juggling attempt.
No, this was the real show. This was when the tent flaps flew open and the full cast of disorganized clowns came tumbling out, chasing each other with flaming hard drives and mismatched expectations.
It began with an email, 16 months after the shoot.
“Do you still have the footage?”
The first email came in just before 6 p.m.—late in the day, but not unusual. That would become the pattern: most messages arrived after hours, often close to midnight. I always replied promptly the next morning. I offered three options for delivery: WeTransfer, FTP, or send me a drive. The drive option was chosen and asked for my address. I sent it along with specs, and it was confirmed that it would be sent right away.
Then—radio silence. Eleven days passed with no drive, and the deadline was approaching. So I decided to move forward on my own. I plugged in the archive drive—Archive 6—and nothing happened. No click, no mount, just blank silence. Classic. I said a prayer, consulted ChatGPT, and downloaded a recovery tool. Four hours later, after purchasing the license and holding my breath, the software resurrected the entire shoot. Interviews, b-roll—intact.
I uploaded the media via WeTransfer and sent word that it was available. That night brought a confused reply—apparently a drive had been sent and I was expected to wait. Except no drive had arrived. I explained, offered to load it once it did, and got a note back clarifying that all materials would need to be returned physically when the project wrapped. Fine. But if an editor already had the files, why not just copy them to a drive on their end? Instead, we were all pretending it made sense to ship a drive 800 miles, then wait for it to come back.
Two days later, I followed up again, asking for a tracking number. I was told it would be sent later. It wasn’t. The next day, I got a USPS alert—the drive had arrived. I texted to confirm, asked whether it would be used on a Windows machine, then reformatted it for cross-platform use when no answer came. The reformat took time, the file transfer even more. By the time a reply came through saying they were editing on a Mac, the job was already done. I mailed the drive the next morning, Priority, using the return address from the original label.
I assumed, wrongly, that this was the end (and that the return address was the correct one).
More days passed. No thank you, no confirmation. Just silence—until eight days later, a message arrived asking whether I’d sent the drive yet. I had. Eight days earlier. To the address already provided. But the PO box hadn’t been checked, and the person was out of town, asking now if I could resend it elsewhere should it bounce back.
I sent the tracking number, the receipt photo, and what can only be described as a silent digital shrug.
This brings us to the present.
This circus has essentially been in residency since February 2024.
Today is July 25, 2025.
And. It’s. Not. Over.
I have no idea if that drive is coming back… only to be bounced off the tent poles and trapezed away again. The transfer cost me $120 via WeTransfer Pro (granted, I get it for a year and I’ll use it). Mailing the drive was around $10. Sending it again will be another $10. I’m not being cheap — I’m not even complaining, really. But $140 is $140. And for what?
Even though the circus isn’t done, it should be. Soon.
But what is done is this little homemade version of EMDR. (Remember, the trauma therapy where you revisit a stressful memory while stimulating both sides of the brain, helping the mind untangle what the emotions can’t.) In this case, I used the keyboard.
Left-right, left-right. Keystroking out the chaos.
And honestly? I feel better.
Hopefully, I’ve got a few readers shaking their heads in unison.
Some staffers, grateful not to deal directly with clients.
Some freelancers, feeling very, very seen.
Sometimes the only way out of a circus… is to write your way through it.
But long before the circus, there was something else, something quieter. Simpler. Or so it seemed.
A spark. A connection. A name I hadn’t yet learned would shape so much of what came after.
And not just what I made, but how I saw. How I chose what to include, what to leave out.
Before there were clients, cameras, and chaos… there was Kim Smith.
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