the client is always right!..

[octane]

Does this sound anything like the average work day for anyone else here, other than me? If so, feel free to tack on your own common, recurring nightmare client conundrums:

I love it .. but...

You spend a week working on a design. You put it to the client and then they call you back: "Yeah, I really love this design. But can we change everything from green to blue and make the round buttons square?"

Clearly they either don't like the design or they don't know what they want. Pick one...

The moon on a stick

The client calls: "Yeah, I'd like to double the size of the web site. I want everything database-driven with a FLash front end, all linking and synching with our back end. We want all of this a month earlier than planned and 2 grand cheaper than you originally quoted."

Red alert / green alert

The client calls: "This is a screamer! need this doing before close of play today. I'll send you the stuff you need."

The 'stuff you need' doesn't arrive.

Over the course of the following week you call, leave voice mail and send half a dozen emails. No reply.

Friday, 5.55pm at the end of the following week: "This really needs doing. I'm sending the stuff through as we speak..."

Sure enough, there is the 'stuff' right there in your in-box.

The client asks: "Can you sort this for before first thing tomorrow morning?"

You reply with hesitant / confused tone: "Err .. well, no. This isn't what we agreed."

"I know", client replies.

"But this is five times the amount of work we agreed to!" You whimper.

"Not a problem, is it?"

You don't know whether he's having you on or he's deadly serious. Further more, you don't know whether to laugh, cry or be sick .. or a combination of all three...

 

[Browni]

Ah, i know it well the YOU WANT WHAT?!?! feeling,

just buckle down, and DEMAND extra payment.

 

[octane]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not new to this. I've been running my own business since mid 1999 and working a few years before that. So I'm a bit of a veteran, though not a gnarled and grizzled one.

I thought it might be a good laugh for others to chip in create a compendium of client horror stories...

 

[brianleahy]

Not precisely a client horror story but a classic "hurry up and wait" tale...

Years ago I worked for a company that made high-tech medical equipment. On the very first day I reported for work, I saw a big box - about 3 feet on a side - sitting in the front hallway. It had a bright yellow label reading "FedEx Sunday Delivery"

Sunday!! I had no idea you could GET FedEx delivery on Sunday, for any price. And this box was quite large and heavy - it was sitting on a wooden pallet. The shipping cost had to have been enormous, hundreds maybe.

I figured that, whatever it was, had to be incredibly important and urgently needed to warrant Sunday delivery.

At 5:30 that evening, as I walked out to my car, the box was still sitting there, untouched.

The next morning, the box was still there, entirely unmolested.

So it went through Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday morning. Finally, Friday evening, someone had taken the box away.

It wasn't long before I came to see that this sort of spurious, artificial urgency was pretty much a way of life there. That incident became, for me, symbolic not only of that company, but of most corporations worldwide.

 

[quiksan]

ah geez...
I'm gonna try not to get started on this one, but have to make a couple comments anyway.

I did a design for a guy:
he told me what he had to put on the site, what he wanted as far as navigation and user experience, and so on.
I mocked something up on paper (while we sat), and he liked everything I explained and drew up.
He gave to some graphics/print guy he knows, who fleshed it out in inDesign, making some pretty pdfs of the intended final product.
I built everything out exactly as we'd agreed, and presented it:
"it needs to be larger"
made changes as requested
"it needs to be smaller"
made changes (back)
"it still needs to be larger"
[dropping gloves and ready to fight...]
Uh, we've already done it that way...
So it went for quite sometime. I got to the point where I told him everytime he'd gone back and forth more than 2 times. it was ridiculous.


other thing that bugs me (about clients), is the RED LIGHT/GREEN LIGHT you mentioned above, Octane.
I'll meet with a client, get things outlined and ready, and to a point where I can't move forward w/o their input or providing something, and I wait, and wait, and wait. Then they want it all in an hour.

ok, I need to take a walk. I'm getting worked-up here.

lol, ah, and I bring this upon myself!!

 

[octane]

We have a saying where I come from; you end up being so confused, you don't know your arse from your elbow.

I make notes of conversations. I supply them to the client as contact reports. So _when_ they change their mind, you just point them to the email you sent them and watch them squirm for a while.

Although it might appear that I'm getting wound up by it all, I'm actually quite philosophical about it now.

I've got most of the holes covered, so if the client decides to bolt, I make sure there's an invoice pinned to their back...

 

[kalantna]

I have a red light/green light client right now. Luckily I have another client who is all green light and wants his site done by friday. As for the first guy he isn't paying enough for a site that I have been working on since August 2002. So from now on all my contracts will have a timeline penalty incorporated within them. So, that is we miss a deadline because of my mistake I loose money, if we miss it because of the client's mistake they pay me more.

 

[uoba]

Where to start... okay, the best one ever... taking a bunch of ex-SAS to court!

(International Security Management (posh word for mercenaries)... wanted web-site... got web-site... didn't want to pay for web-site... taken to court).

We won. But the fact that I've changed gender, moved out to a distant country and work the fields for a living, is a bit hard to come to terms with!

The sad thing was, the design was outstanding but it is not allowed to be shown publicly (they paid up, but stressed these terms).

 

[chevy]

a customer is a customer as long as he pays.

 

[voice-]

What's worse is when "pros" act this way.

I'm only 18, but I was in school to become a printer last year, and we, like some other classes at school (these were graphical design classes, they are supposed, in a few years, to do what you guys do today). The 2 in question her are us, Switch, and the a class calling their company Focus.

We had some early experience with them, they needed their folders printed and we were both cheapest and closest. After a lot of arguing as us persuading them that we couldn't cut the folders exactly how they wanted, they finally stated making the folders. Being the fools we were, we didn't get a contract running once they entered our door, naturally, we should have.
Three hours before they needed the folders delivered, they show up with the datafiles. We explained to them that it wasn't possible to get a perfect result with 2 colours, from datafiles to cut cards in 3 hours. They suggested they could get half the cards now and the other half later, and raising the fee.
For those not understanding that, the problem is that each colour must be printed separately, and requires time to dry, preferrably a day. The other problem was that they still didn't think of our abilities of cutting when designing the damn things.

I printed the files onto film and made plates for printing. This is a pretty simple task, it took a few minutes. We then mounted one plate into the machine, printed the folders, let them dry for an hour, printed the other colour, let them dry for an hour and cut them to the best of our efforts. We then told Focus that the remaining cutting had to be done by hand, and that that was not our job. They persuaded us to help, and we had it delivered on time in the end.

Later, they argue we delivered incomplete folders, that the colours weren't dried properly and they remembered an agreement on quite a different price than what we did. That's when we learned to keep papers on everything and to never deal with Focus.

Anyways, months later, at a big fair for school companies we both won some awards and got some clients. Deals started rolling in and for the first time, Switch had to start turning people away. We had offers on 2 jobs, one was from a school paying well, but not good, the other was from a bigger client paying far better. We went for him.

His idea was that us school companies were a delight and he wanted to use our services to the max. He gave Focus the job of designing his folder and us the job of printing it, he was to pay us both at the same time and wanted us to split the cash as we saw fit. Half the case - expenses was still more than the school would have paid, so we said yes.

Focus then dragged their feet for a month or two, then made a half-assed attempt at designing something. It looked horrible, but the deadline was nearing and they had to send it in for approval. It was rejected (I guess not everyone likes electric guitars on a radiactive green and black as their folder background) and Focus were given 2 weeks to improve. By that time, the company had split in 2 groups of 3 girls each (no-one is to tell me an all-girls company was a good idea), neither talking to the other, neither taking responsibility. They never did get back to the client and we lost the job for it (had we known, we would go for the school's job).

Very sad when people don't do as they should when they should and then expect you to cast a speed-spell and get the job done in minutes...