I’d been working on a business plan for a client to be printed and distributed at an upcoming conference. The timeline was a tight turnaround with a hard deadline for getting the finished InDesign file to the printer. I’d been bugging the client for feedback for a week, and of course they only looked at it day of.
An hour before final submission time:
Client: All these bullet points end without punctuation. They should end with semicolons and a period on the final line.
It was a long document, so I scrambled to go through and “fix” the formatting. No, there wasn’t a style guide dictating this is how bullet points should work, and yes, the previous way was consistent throughout the document. The client just decided it should be this way at the last second.
After I submitted to the printer in time (barely):
Client: I want to take about these semicolons. This was a major oversight – what can you do on the future to avoid these mistakes?
My immediate reaction was “not work with you” but I held my tongue.
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