Credit the Edit - Ralph Scott, AKA Ralph Penza, AKA Edward It Been waiting seven months for full payment for work done over a year ago. Petaluma California

They say you really haven't arrived until you've been parodied on The Simpsons or appeared on the RIPOFF REPORT.  We're still hopeful that Bart S. will be celebrating our company name from atop his skateboard any day now.

The employee who filed this report, Isabel Levinson, a 1099 subcontracted editor from Minneapolis, was let go by our firm after no fewer than four clients filed complaints about her work.  The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back came when she dropped the ball on a manuscript project on the premise that she had to vacation in Europe for four weeks in 2013. She promised to bring her laptop on her trip so that she could finally deliver upon edits on a client's manuscript for which we retained her services.  When she got to Europe, we inquired as to when we might expect work that was now several months past due. She responded that she was having problems accessing the Word files on her laptop, something strangely to do with her laptop.  Strange that she didn't check her laptop before she left Minneapolis. 

When she returned stateside, she pledged to have the editorial work sent to us within a few days. It never arrived. Meanwhile, the client, who had high marks for previous work we had performed -- work performed inhouse, not by Isabel Levinson, by the way -- was becoming increasingly disenchanted to the point of angry.  So we immediately retained another editor -- a highly credentialed editor who, because he had to jump in and make up for everything that Isabel Levinson did not complete, or even begin, understantably compelled us to pay him a much larger chunk of change to correct the nightmare. Meanwhile, we sent repeated emails to Isabel Levinson requesting a date when we could expect the editorial for which she had been hired.  Isabel Levinson eventually responded with an excuse that, per our email archive, she had used no fewer than three times over the course of two years: "There's been a power outage in my neighborhood." (You can see where this is going, right?) Three time's a charm. A fourth time? No, we weren't going to just buy in to this excuse. So we did the right thing: we contacted the power company that handles power for Isabel Levinson's neighborhood. After placing us on a hold for a few minutes, the customer service rep came back on the line and said there were no power outages reported in the area where Isabel Levinson works out of her apartment. In fact, the rep said, "there hasn't been an outage in the neighborhood for more than ten years."

That was it. We had to fire her.  As we were forced to retain a new editor and absorb substantial cost, we debited the amount we were forced to incur out of the fee that Isabel would otherwise have been paid for other work where, by the way, she turned out a poor performance as well. A few of our clients (all emails on file) suggested that we should have taken the action of firing her far earlier.  Perhaps, but we wanted to give Isabel the benefit of the doubt those first three times. Bad call in the end. Because upon calling her on the carpet, she sent our firm an email in which she threatened to file a listing with the RIPOFF REPORT if she wasn't compensated. In short, she was threatening extortion.

Her termination letter is on file. If you would like to inquire further, please send your full name, mailing address, email address, and a phone number, in the event we need to follow up with you, along with your request to info@credittheedit.com and we'll forward your request to our corporate counsel. He is still debating whether or not to proceed with his original suggestion of pressing criminal extortion charges against Isabel Levinson in addition to filing a civil lawsuit. We would prefer not to go there but Isabel apparently has committed a crime so who knows what the future holds.

By the way, when Isabel Levinson first approached our company by email back in or about 2010, during the online interview process, she made a point of noting that she was busy attempting to collect from an attorney who had hired her for some job (we don't know the type of employment). She informed us that she was attempting to track him down so that she could sue him. In the very least, she informed us, she was going to spread word about him online.  We should have taken heed then as to whom we were getting involved with.

Where's Bart Simpson when you need him?