Clients from Hell

A client wanted me to illustrate their children’s book. I had a vague idea of what they wanted but wanted clarification:

Me: What kind of style do you want for the illustrations?

Client: LOL what do you mean what style? Just illustrate it!

My guess was they wanted something like American cartoons, but in terms of narrowing things down that gets us from “ocean” to “huge pond.”

I never got the direction I needed, and eventually dropped the project.

My advice to clients looking for illustrations: we can’t read your minds. You need to be specific when conveying your vision to us.

I was working as a receptionist at a vet clinic to pay my way through my degree in Graphic Design. I was in my last semester of the program and beginning to accept freelance work in my free time. My boss knew this and approached me with some work: 

Client: Hey, we need a flyer for an upcoming event. Can you whip something up? Here’s the info.

Me: I can’t really do this here – all we have on these computers is Word.

Client: Why don’t you use your designer programs? We need something eye-catching!

Me: Just to be clear, you’re asking me to use programs that I pay for out of my pocket, on my personal laptop that I also paid for, during work hours at a job where I was not hired for my skills as a Graphic Designer, to create a professionally designed product for you, with no increase in my hourly rate? I’m sorry, but no. If you would like, we can certainly discuss my freelance rates after hours. I charge $25/hr and I estimate a flyer of this type would take about 2-3 hours.

Client: Seriously? That’s way too much for a simple flyer! Isn’t there like a Friends and Family discount?

Me: No.

He was silent for a moment and then went back to his office. He later made his own version on Word, using about five conflicting fonts in various colors.

This encounter was pretty typical of the culture there, and I quit two weeks later.

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I asked a client for her logo.

She printed out a document Word doc that had the logo in it (it apparently was designed in Word), scanned it as a jpeg, and inserted that jpeg into a new .doc file.

By the time I got it, it was blurry, cut off, and nearly indecipherable.

When I think about how misguided every step of this process was, I shudder.

A client called our office today to complain about a postcard one of our team members sent out. We thought it was just that she didn’t want to be on a mailing list, but it was so much weirder than that:

Client: I found this card very disturbing. One of the pictures is of him playing with his dog, not on a leash, in a park that is not a dog park. This is illegal; he may as well have put a photo of him shooting up the park on there.

…WTF?

Client: I want the left sidebar very narrow and the images at the center very close to it…

I delete all margins and paddings until the sidebar is super narrow.

Client: And I want my name very big on the sidebar, all on one line. Like, very big.

Me: OK, so we need this tool to streamline this process and automate it so we save ourselves several hours each shift. It would probably result in about a 20% reduction in our workload.

Client: That sounds great!

Me: I’ve already got a draft of what it will do, how it will work, and how the UI will work/look.

Client: I need this to be different. This just won’t cut it for what we need. Can you make these changes?

Me: I can, but it might not work.

Client: How so?

Me: It will definitely affect the performance and overall usefulness of the tool for us, but if you really need it then I can we can sacrifice some functionality.

I then go away to work on the ‘revised and improved’ version as requested, often times taking multiple times longer than planned for the 'base’ version.

Client: Why is this taking so long to work, and why does it not do what you said it could do?

Me: Because you asked me to make it this way.

Client: You should have said it would not work.

Except I did.

A website client of mine and I met at a restaurant so he could give me photos to put on the site and tell me what he wanted (I do my work in my home and often find it more convenient if I drive to a restaurant or coffee shop nearer to the client).

There we discussed the pages he wanted, the pictures and video he had for me to go on those pages, etc. The contract that he signed stated that the content was his responsibility, not mine.

Over the course of 6 months I consistently had issues getting content from him. He would say, “oh, that photo was on the thumb-drive I gave you” when it actually wasn’t. I basically built the site with some of his photos and, initially, much of my text content. The 6 months basically went like this:

Me: I was wondering if you had the content I need for that page.

Client: I am pretty busy right now. I will get it for you tonight.

A week later:

Me: Hey, did you happen to get the content for that page I mentioned a week ago?

Client: Sorry. Got held up on a big job. I will have it for you this weekend …

Then another week, and nothing.

So it went for months. When I was finally down to the last bit of wording I needed for the final page, I sent the following text:

Me: Hey if you can give me the text you want on the 246 page we can be done with the site.

Client: No we are not done. It is done when it is exactly how I want it. I am not paying you not to finish! To be honest, I don’t even like the site. Are you even licensed to build websites? I could have had this site done a lot sooner at a lower price and they would have done all the content. Why did I have to do all the work to get you content? And why did we meet at a restaurant? A real business wouldn’t operate like that.

Me: …

This would be a justified homicide, right?

Client: Can you tell me my son’s social security number. I forgot it.

Me: Due to HIPAA Privacy Laws, I’m unable to disclose such information with you.

Client: Can you give me a hint?