In September, we were asked to provide a very specific type of engineer for a long term project out of state. We'll call this guy Al. Al's contract with our customer states that he will work through the end of this month. About a month ago, I started reminding the customer that Al would be gone by April first. I stated very specifically that if Al's services were required beyond the end of the month, we'd have to get a new Purchase Order from them.

Several emails and two conference calls later, it was determined (by the customer's onsite project manager) that Al was already done with all the work he needed to do, and was being kept onsite doing 'busy' work to use up the hours in his contract. He would not be needed past the end of the month.

Great! No problem! You guys have Al through the end of March, use him however you like. Everybody is happy.

Late yesterday afternoon I get an email from the customer saying "Go ahead an give me a price to keep Al onsite through the end of April, we need him after all."

Well, having been told three weeks ago that he wouldn't be needed, we've already got him scheduled to start another project in another state on April first. We have exactly two other guys who could do Al's job. One of them is in yet another state working a project for the same customer, the other is myself, who supports all of this customers projects and can't be on a single job for a month. So Al is going to stay, we've cancelled the job he's supposed to start next month, and I'm tasked with providing the customer a price to keep Al where he's at for a month.

Now the problem... How do we tell the customer that we don't much care for the last minute notice and that they're really screwing us up? This is not an isolated incident with this customer, we are always jumping through hoops at the last minute for them. Obviously we don't want to torque the customer so much that they quit using us, we just want them to quit abusing us. I'm thinking of adding 25-50% of Al's normal price for a month of labor and calling it --I don't know-- an emergency response rate or something like that. I'm also thinking of putting very specific wording in the quote that says if they want to extend Al again beyond April, we have to have a PO by April 15th, or we will not be able to extend the contract again.

There is a point where the customer's money isn't worth our aggravation. We haven't reached that point yet, but a lot of our guys don't want to have anything to do with this particular customer anymore. (Not that they have much choice =P )

We're going to give them Al. We're going to support them, but I sure want to beat into their heads that a little bit of consideration is in order.

Thoughts?