Advertising.
If the day has been quiet enough that you think you might actually get to go home at six for once, a client will call at 5 and say they want to have a meeting, never starting earlier than 7 (the latest so far is midnight).
Never put anything in your work that you’d be embarrassed to have to explain during a presentation. That means don’t use insulting comments as dummy copy, don’t give design layers snotty names, and don’t start writing flame mail in the middle of your body copy with the intent of deleting it later. I saw that last one blow up in the face of a writer from another company when his PR article contained a long diatribe about his boss, his boss’s boss, and the client, which he forgot to delete before sending the article to all three. He even ended it with “Reminder: delete this before sending.”
In matters of grammar and puctuation, right and wrong don’t matter nearly as much as consistency.
A demand from a client that you come in on Saturday (for anything but a final proof) means that they have dug themselves into a hole but have no idea what to do to get out. From this, you can be sure that:
- The more frantically the client insists that you come in on Saturday, the less likely it is that you will actually do anything.
- The chance that this “emergency, absolutely vital, Now! Now! Now!” content that you came in to make will eventually be tossed out and never used, is 1.0.
- The chance that the client will ever acknowledge that this is all their fault for running around like a headless chicken, is 0.