Quosting

"He wants how much?! For a website? No bloody way - I could buy 11 decently sized bouncy castles for that!" is what Julia may or may not have exclaimed aloud to herself in her home-office a few days ago. Alas, I will never know if that's true - she failed to articulate her thoughts on the matter to me.

"The CEO has left the business since I briefed you, and the new CEO hasn't approved budget for this project so I'll have to start the tender process all over again, probably next month..." said Philip, an exuberant project manager whose abundant energy I devoured during our initial scoping call...
Philip at least regaled me with a quasi-interesting anecdote about internal management restructuring before he was never seen or heard from again.

Louise - a fundraiser for an archaeological society - was very complimentary about my EOY report design proposal and quote, but understandably had to run it past her trustees first. Based on the length of time that's taking my guess is Louise and her trustees communicate via petroglyphs they carve over several weeks and then bury in undisclosed locations for the other to dig up and decipher.

As tempting as it is to conclude these unfortunate souls have each coincidently met their end (blast from over-inflating recreational equipment / heart defect triggered by sustained corporate exasperation / inflicting the wrath of a cursed spirit by disturbing consecrated ground) between receiving my project costing and responding to my project costing, it's all the more likely that they're perfectly capacitated but have opted to silently reject my quotes and ignore my follow up correspondence.

But why? Where has this uncouth practice come from and why is it now so commonplace?

Such disregard for professional chivalry is undoubtedly a byproduct of consigning modern communication to digital technology, where loopholes in conventional etiquette are afforded by the lack of personal presence. We've all (mostly) agreed that email displaces the "here" and "now" to "who cares where" and "later, I'm busy", so sending them is a less significant event than, say, having a chat over a coffee. Couple this with the exponential predilection for avoiding direct discomfort/confrontation afforded by other immediate forms of communication, and entire lines of enquiry are reduced to the likes of flash cards, becoming all the more transient, misinterpreted or overlooked.
Deflecting email draws parallels with an earlier (the earliest?) example of harnessing technological convenience to buffer communication - the answering machine. Originally designed as a tool to maximise lines of communication answering machines were found to afford the inverse - the means to mitigate unpleasantness or inconvenience by screening inbound calls, engaging only selectively with those that hold the most appeal. Email, it seems, has followed suit, only without the stewarding from a vocal recording and the abruptness of a slammed receiver clunk.

"Thanks, but we've decided to go with another provider" replies communications officer Tom from a cat shelter, whose message belays my apprehension that he'd succumbed to mass mauling. His brevity leaves details scant, but his diligence as a communications officer means he's at least composed a reply. He didn't outright state that the quote I tendered for his website redesign project gave him cause to seek alternate comparative costing, nor did he state that he long had his provider of choice locked in and only needed comparative costing in place to satisfy his organisation's archaic tendering protocols (probably). But by not letting silence speak for itself he banished the quosting spectre with closure on the matter, so for that I am marginally grateful.

To the quosters I say; it's perfectly acceptable to not like my quote. You have a budget in mind for a particular task and what I would charge to carry out that task exceeds it. That's fine. That happens. I know it, you know it, we all know it - so what's the harm in addressing it? Why not start a dialogue?
Culturally, where quoting is concerned, I think we've lost sight of dialogue. We take a price to be a line in the sand when really we're free to negotiate it. Goal-post shifting mid-project is typically frowned upon but when on this side of contracting it's most agreeable. If the brief is too rich, how can we scale it back? What can we substitute, template, or slacken to bring the quote down? What can we segment into phases to break the workload up? I'd much rather spend the back and forth bartering and refining our working terms than speculating through which unusual workplace circumstance has claimed your soul.