I do real estate photography. I am often flabbergasted by how stubborn some people can be when they are absolutely, categorically wrong — with written evidence — but will not back down and say, “Ah, sorry, you are right.”

For the last month, I have been trying to convince a client she has not paid me. She is convinced that she has because she can see a note in her banking that she initiated an EFT (electronic funds transfer) payment to me. She is ignoring — studiously — my questions about whether she received any confirmation emails, which are always triggered when an EFT is accepted/deposited.

She and I both know she did not receive such an email.

She keeps sending me screenshots of her banking with the debit/credit columns cut off, so I can’t see that there is no debit to her account, but I know there is not one. She has not, however, done a search of her own accounts to confirm that the payment was actually withdrawn — and if she were to do this, she would confirm the payment was initiated but not completed.

I’ve suggested she used a malformed email, but until today, she would not acknowledge that. However, she tells me she sent the payment to an unmonitored email owned by my payment company. I contacted their support via chat, and they replied that there was no way her payment would have reached anyone. They checked my account and confirmed that no payment from her existed. I took a screenshot of that message and sent it to my client.

I don’t know what to do with people who would rather carry on for a month than just do a facepalm, say, “Sorry, that was a dumb move on my part,” and pay up.

I suspect she’s going to continue to refuse to pay me. I provided photography to this client previously about ten years ago and encountered the same issues; she’s very not tech-savvy and tends to go off before doing appropriate checks.

It’s so bloody frustrating for a sub-$200 payment, particularly as the listing I shot for her sold within ten days.

I work for a design agency.

Contact: “The client is unhappy. People are not taking part in the campaign. We are not sure we can pay you since we are not sure they will pay us.”

Me: “What does this have to do with me? Everything I was responsible for works just fine.”

Contact: “Look, we’re not too happy about it, either, but that’s life.”

I’ve always had a weird way of knowing things about people. Sometimes a car driving just like every other car will “feel” weird right before I see them cut someone else off, or a customer will pass by and I just know they’re going to be a problem. My friends and coworkers call it my Spidey-Sense.

I am scheduled to meet with a client I have never seen before, first thing in the morning. I park in the parking garage and walk toward the elevator. I pass a man and nod; he rolls his eyes and keeps walking. I get the weird feeling, but I don’t say anything. We get in the elevator to go to the ground floor, and he lights a cigarette.

Me: “No smoking in the elevator, sir.”

I point to the sign right in front of him. He glares and exhales right in my face before exiting. The ride is no more than a minute long, so it would not have killed him to wait.

Man: “F****** weirdos in this city…”

He mutters something else about drugs before work.

Me: “Have the day you deserve, sir!”

He walks in the opposite direction, and I go to my office and wait for my new client. My supervisor asks if he can sit in with me since this is a potentially huge deal for the company. While we wait, I tell him the story of the man in the elevator.

Me: “My Spidey-Sense was tingling as soon as I saw him.”

Supervisor: “Maybe you just knew he would be a jerk.”

Me: “Maybe. It hasn’t been wrong yet!”

Ten minutes after we are supposed to meet, the same man walks in. He stops in the doorway, jaw on the floor.

Me: “Hello, Mr. [Client].”

Man: *Shocked* “You’re the one from the garage.”

Me: “I am. Have you met [Supervisor]?”

Man: “Uh, yeah. Hi.”

Supervisor: “Good to see you, [Client]. And just so you know, this whole building is smoke-free, too.”

The meeting went well, and we secured the contract. The client was much nicer from then on, though he never seemed to want to look me in the eye.

I’m a copywriter, and recently, I edited brochure content for our client: a school. The next day at work, one of my colleagues told me that the client had called and complained about a “spelling mistake” in the content. 

I checked the content once and found nothing. They still maintained that there were spelling mistakes. I took quite some time and checked the entire content twice more. I still couldn’t find anything, so I called the client.

Me: “Sir, I couldn’t find any mistakes.”

Client: “There is. There is.”

Me: “Please tell me what it is, then.”

Client: “In one part of the brochure, you have titled the section, ‘Salient Features’. It should be ‘Silent Features’, right?”

Hiding my shock that I had wasted an hour and a half on this, I explained how his school had “salient features”, not “silent features”.

I work for a local newspaper. We are doing an advertisement page for local businesses to promote themselves by posting images of their business cards. They were all told by the sales staff to send me either PDF files of their cards or scanned images — preferably the first option.

One sends me a photo of his card, which is in black and white.

Client: “Can you redesign my card? I don’t like it. And I want it in color.”