Look, I know I get paid to work with clients. But what in the world makes some people think that just because they pay you, that you have to take abuse from them? I don’t ask for much - just read the freaking contract you signed and let me do what you are paying me to do under those terms! You don’t like it? Here is a change order to modify the terms! You don’t like all the change orders? Don’t change your freaking mind so much! You want to spend my time (and your money) arguing about every detail instead of negotiating the terms in advance, hey its your nickel - don’t complain when you get the bill.
[this was written yesterday before the outage, so adjust the days accordingly]
We’ve been producing a 30-page catalog/product guide for an electronics company, for a new product type that they’re releasing for the first time ever. The guide alone has been going on for a month (it’s going to the printer’s today), and related jobs started back in February. In the last month, we’ve spent easily 100 hours in meetings with these people, mainly because they can never come to a decision.
The clients were supposed to proofread everything and give us feedback on the copy, layout and images last week. They never got around to it, each day telling us that they’d get back to us the next day. Finally they come in for another meeting on Monday morning and again start dithering around. My boss loses his temper and shouts at them, “What. Do. You. WANT?” before getting up and walking out of the room. The rest of us follow him out. Twenty minutes later they poke their heads out of the meeting room with a list of changes that they could have produced a week earlier.
Last night, at about 10pm (12 hours before it goes to print), we get another call from them. A mistake that nobody caught? An emergency change to the specifications? Nope. “I don’t really like this font.” I swear to Og, that’s really what he called about at 10pm the night before final printing. You’ve been looking at this guide for a month now, and this is when you decide to change the font? This would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but you’ve also been insisting that every time the product name appears in the text, we have to use an image of the logo instead (this is a branding and advertising “Don’t” that designers learn in their first week). Changing the font means that every space set aside for the logo (about 5 per page) is now mis-aligned and has to be fixed.
I asked my boss how much we’re going to charge for the extra aggravation. His answer was “zero.”
“Really?”
“Yep. See the total on this bill? Add a zero to it.”
And to top it all, up to this point, we’ve had to translate from Japanese documentation for all the function and part names. We’ve asked him to check if the terms we’ve come up with are what they want in their official documents, but for three weeks he never got around to it. Now, 30 minutes before the data was going to be sent out, he sends us an “official” list of English names that he’s been sitting on all this time, and tells us we have to match everything to that list.
The thought of how obscenely we’re charging him for this makes it worthwhile.
