I work in accounts management for a large university. It is university policy that all employees of any type must have an employee email at the employee domain and all students must have a student email at the student domain. This sometimes leads to issues where a student employee or employee who is also a student does not realize they have two accounts.

In this case, a supervisor of student employees is emailing me.

Client: “I’m not sure who to address this issue to, but I received a call from one of the Chairpeople indicating that they have a situation with student employees having multiple email accounts.”

Me: “It is university policy that all employees have an employee email address. We can work with the students to set up automatic forwarding from their employee account to their student account so they do not have to monitor both.”

Client: “I’ve looked at this student’s account, and they have two email accounts. They are listed in the system as a ‘student employee’.”

Me: “Yes, as I said, it is university policy. If they do not want to set up forwarding, we can assist them in setting up proxy access for easier usage.”

Client: “But is it necessary for the student to have two email accounts? Could this be changed so that the student can only have one email account at [student domain]?”

Me: *Pauses* “Yes, it is necessary. Policy.”

My client is late on a payment. I send several PayPal invoices in hopes to collect payment, but they swear they’ve mailed payment.

Me: “What address did you send the payment to?”

Client: “I sent it to [address], as per your invoice.”

Me: “That’s Paypal’s corporate office.”

A client contacts me for a commercial for her new business. We meet. I spend some time putting together a proposal to meet her low budget and high expectations. She doesn’t reply.

Four months later, she calls me up and asks me for another meeting and another proposal as she has rebranded her business. We meet. She has higher expectations due to her new branding, courtesy of her recently hired “Head of Marketing”, who claims to have worked for decades with companies like Sony.

Together, they request a new proposal that still stays with her original low budget.

I write up a new proposal and wait. She disappears.

A month later, after three attempts to reconnect via email, she finally replies.

Client: “Sorry for not getting back to you as I was out of the country. I found someone else to produce the commercial, as it was time sensitive and needed to be completed earlier.”

I gave instructions in a PDF to a client about how to make updates. I included screenshots of the pages with explicit instructions on how to log in and make changes and what buttons to push. They emailed me with a problem.

Client: “Nothing works! It’s all broken! What’s going on?”

The problem? They were clicking the update “button” in the screenshot — the one with the big red arrow I had drawn next to it.

I had a trophy-wife client who had a frozen yoghurt business paid for by her husband. They contacted me and asked me to design and build a new website for her business. I gave them a quote, and they asked if they could pay in three instalments. After we all agreed to the terms, I had written approval, and I received my 33% deposit, I got cracking.

We had regular check-ins, and they were happy with the progress until, one day, they just went quiet. They were already behind on the second payment and I was growing impatient. I was done with the site and just needed final approval and payment before launching it, but I couldn’t get ahold of either of them.

I eventually got hold of the lady at her day job after weeks of being ghosted.

Lady: *Calmly* “We found someone cheaper. We won’t be paying the remaining 66%.”

Me: “But the project is complete and all your feedback has been addressed.”

Lady: “You could just give me 33% of the files and move on with your life.”

Me: “Websites don’t really work if you only upload 33% of the files.”

She hung up the phone.

I still had the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) details for the brand domain that housed their current (old) website, so I decided to take revenge. I created a page with an animated fake loading bar that was stuck at 33%. Underneath the loading bar was the message: “This company does not pay their suppliers. They decided to pay only a third of the price, so now they have only a third of a website.”

I went as far as to download the website files, split it up into roughly three portions (file size), and upload a zip folder containing a third of the files to the FTP folder. This way, I actually gave them the 33% they had paid for and I could show the file size to prove it.

I also permanently deleted the old site’s files from the folder so they couldn’t restore from a backup — not that they’d have a clue how to do that.

They threatened to sue me. I’m still waiting.