My First 1-Star Yelp Rating

Well… it happened.

I got my first 1-star rating on Yelp. And I take full responsibility for it.

Here’s the story.

I had been texting with a client for a while regarding their desire for a family reunion. They had been looking for a photographer in the Sacramento area and they found me. This was a few months back and I added them to my Google calendar. As the months went by, Blacksheep Studios grew and the growth required me to begin a new calendar with my associates. I began a new calendar and started adding new jobs to the newly created calendar. The great thing about Google calendar is that you can have multiple calendars open at the same time. So I had my older calendar alongside my new one.

A few weeks ago I was in a consolidating mood and decided I needed to clean up odds and ends. I noticed that there were two similar calendars on the calendar, and at that moment I thought they were just duplicates. So I deleted one of them.

Well, the calendar that I deleted was my old, I’ll call it my ‘legacy’ calendar. This calendar was the one that I had all my old jobs on as well as a few upcoming jobs that were made on that one before I created the updated new calendar. Long story short, the job that I had been discussing with the client for a few months had been deleted along with everything else that was on that calendar.

I immediate did a Google search trying to find out how to restore the calendar I just deleted. As it turns out, I was out of luck… there was no way to restore it at all. In fact, I ended up reading accounts of others who had done the same thing and lost important calendars.

I obviously missed my client’s scheduled shoot as it wasn’t scheduled on my (now deleted) calendar. I live and die by Google calendar. It has been an amazing tool for me, but this time around it caused me to really mess up. My full reliance on it was really my downfall.

I wish Google would have implemented something that held the deleted calendars for a little while rather than just completely taking them out of existence when you push the delete button. I know many people more important that I am rely on Google services to manage their large companies. Maybe in the future Google will put this feature in - but for now I have to live with the consequences of what happened.

I truly feel terrible about what happened with my client and I reached out to them to offer an apology and a little compensation. I hope they get back to me so that we can wrap this up a little better for them. I understand their anger and frustration with me.

As a business professional, I know these types of things happen… and will most likely happen again. It just never feels good when it does.