Not a client per se, but I was helping to prepare for
my grandmother’s 80th birthday shindig and one of my grandmother’s neighbours
was setting up a screen display for the event. She had misspelled my
grandmother’s last name and was trying to fix it, but was having some
difficulty with it.

I offered her a hand, assuming it would be a quick
fix and also figuring that while I was at it I could surreptitiously alter some
of her horrendous design choices. She protested at first, saying something
along the lines of having twenty years of experience, but gave in after a
moment.

Me:
(sitting down at her laptop) So, this seems like a different version of Photoshop
than I’m familiar with. Where’s your layers panel?

Her: I’m
not sure what you’re talking about.

Me: The
layers panel, with all your text items? It should be in your workspace.

I tried to find her workspace settings, but it was
such an old version of Photoshop that I couldn’t find it immediately.

Her: Oh,
the text! It’s all in here”

She pulled up a Word Document with the text entirely
composed in WordArt. I stifled a groan.

Me: That
could help, but for now I just want to see the layer in the Photoshop file
where you placed the text.

I kept searching. She got impatient and then shooed
me away so that she could fix it.

I watched in horror
as she used the eraser tool to carve away at the misspelled name. I realized
that for all her “twenty years of experience,” there was no layers panel, there
would never be a layers panel. She’d pasted everything into her background. The
background tiles, the clipart, the misspelled name – all part of the same,
misbegotten jumble.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse her hand slipped on the mouse and the
eraser tool cut into the main graphic. Rather than just Ctrl-Zing it, she
grumbled quietly and went into ANOTHER word document to copy an embedded image
and pasted it over her ruined one in Photoshop. And then in a masterful coup de grace, she corrected the
misspelled name in WordArt, copied it, pasted it, and smiled proudly back up at
me.

Her: See, I said I could do it by
myself. I
do this for a living, you know.