I was working as a producer for a client who brought in a pool of actors they wanted to use in an upcoming production.

Me: “I noticed you have some Asian talent in the headshots you sent us. Do you know what ethnicity they are?”

Client: “I think this one is Japanese, this one, I think, is Cambodian, and this girl may be Korean.”

Me: “Do any of them speak their native language?”

Client: “I think they all speak a little Asian, yeah.”

Related:
Don’t You Speak Asian?, Part 5
Don’t You Speak Asian?, Part 4
Don’t You Speak Asian?, Part 3
Don’t You Speak Asian?, Part 2
Don’t You Speak Asian?

Me: “Just a heads-up, if you log onto our website, you can see that the site is down. My publisher has been unreliable and I am working as quickly as I can to get the site back up. I’m so sorry for this; I’ll let you know when the article is posted as soon as possible.”

Client: “Okay. What’s the website again? Sorry.”

I give him the URL.

Client: “Hey, it says the page is broken!”

Me: “I just told you it’s down.”

Client: “I thought you meant it’s down like ‘fresh’! I won’t have this!”

I get a phone call from a client I built a website for.

Client: “The site isn’t working right.”

Me: “That’s strange.”

I download a page and take a look at the code.

Me: “It looks like a bunch of the code is missing. Did you have anyone modify the site?”

Client: “No, nothing like that.”

Me: “Well, there are entire chunks of code missing that were there yesterday.”

Client: “Oh, yeah, that was me. Some of the code seemed unnecessary. Back to the issue at hand: why isn’t the site working?”

I work as dispatch for a trucking company. One of my duties is to provide the closest truck driver for shipment. I get a call from a customer.

Customer: We can pay [generous amount] for this shipment, can you please check with your driver if that will be enough for him?”

I ask the driver:

Driver: “Yes, lock it down!”

Customer: “Alright, send your driver to the address.”

When the driver arrives at the address, he needs to wait for a couple of hours because they “made a mistake” with the paperwork. After asking them when they will be ready, only at the end do they tell him they sent their shipment with another courier for less money, and they didn’t even contact us. The driver tells me this and I call them asking for an explanation. They only said “sorry “and hung up.

Related:
Absolutely Trucking Mad, Part 4
Absolutely Trucking Mad, Part 3
Absolutely Trucking Mad, Part 2
Absolutely Trucking Mad

A client wants his dissertation laid out for print. It’s a pretty complicated task; it has tons of special characters and specific formatting, so I have lots of trouble with fixing all the little fails in the document.

One step before I am finished (and have already have been paid a fixed price – stupid me!), the publishers find out the author hasn’t even read the annotations of the second reviewer and it has almost a thousand mistakes left in the document that he just ignored. At this point, I have already worked hours for free just to finish this project.

The publishers and I tell him to give me the list with the mistakes, so I can fix them in the fragile, complicated, easy-to-destroy document. He refuses. We try to convince him for weeks. He refuses. We tell him if he does it himself, it will be more work for him, me, and the publishers and will result in a worse-looking book. He refuses.

Client: “I’ll pay 100 extra euros.”

Me: “That’s not even enough for three hours of work, and I will need eight to ten hours to fix what you will be ruining.”

The client goes on with doing whatever he’s doing and ignores me. When I get his document back, it will be h*** for almost no pay. Why can’t they just listen to the professionals?