Client: “I would like a website that can sell my stuff in every country in the world.”

Me: “We can do that, but it will take a lot of time to set everything up to ship to every country.”

Client: “What kind of stuff do you need to set up?”

Me: “The shipping costs, for example.”

Client: “No, just set it to be sent by boat everywhere.”

Me: “…”

Client: “Or… by drone!”

Client: “You shouldn’t be able to put dashes or hyphens in this field. Fix that.”

Me: “You got it.”

I fixed the field to prevent it from allowing anything but numeric characters. Two days later, I got another message.

Client: “Hey, this is supposed to allow negative numbers, but we can’t put the ‘negative sign’!”

Me: “You mean ‘dashes or hyphens’?”

Client: “Um, duh. What else would I mean?”

Me: “Oh, of course. My bad.”

I’m a freelance designer working on a local businessman’s website. The client wanted four or five pages on the site but never specified what he wanted on each page other than a title.

Me: “In terms of design, I think I’ve finished everything you’ve asked me to do. Go ahead and take a look at what I’ve uploaded, and let me know if you need any final tweaks before we wrap things up.”

Client: “Well, I looked at it, but there’s no text on any of the pages!”

Me: “That’s right — you didn’t give me any content to put on the site. You wanted to do that yourself, remember?”

Client: “Well, it needs something on there! Just write some stuff about my business!”

Me: “I’d be happy to add text for you, but you need to tell me what you’d like me to write. I don’t know anything about your business other than that you repair HVAC units.”

Client: “I don’t know, just, like… stuff about my business.”

Me: “Okay… How long have you been in business? Are you insured, licensed, bonded, or registered with the Better Business Bureau? Do you have a business address or a PO box number or anything you can tell me about to add to the site? What kinds of units do you have experience repairing? Are you trying to reach a residential crowd, or a commercial one, or both?”

Client: “I don’t want to give out any of that information. I accept credit card payments, though!”

I’m a web developer, and in this instance, my client was the reverend from a local church, who was a lovely chap. I’d built the first draft of the website, we’d met up again, and everyone was happy with it.

I came into work the following day to an email from the reverend stating that he liked the site but had a few suggestions. His “suggestions” were a list of websites that he thought we might like to “skim the code from”.

This reverend obviously never got to the Ten Commandments section of the Bible.

A repeat client decided to go to another company for a project to save on costs. We had worked with her for a long time, so when she requested that we send one previously made file to the new company, it didn’t seem like a problem.

Me: “How would they like this file delivered?”

Client: “Just on a DVD would be fine.”

I sent them an unlocked DVD, with the file.

Client: “They can’t get the file off the DVD.”

Me: “That’s strange. Can I just send them the file via Dropbox?”

After getting the go-ahead, I emailed them the file in the format they had requested.

Client: “They say the video is too orange.”

Me: “I haven’t touched it since you last saw it, but I can send it again.”

They requested another format. I was about to leave for the week, and my client was well aware of that. I sent them the file in another format (and included another few types just as backup) and didn’t hear anything back the next day, so I assumed they had figured it out. 

A week later, I checked my work email to see this message from the other company.

My Competition: “HELP! THE FILE DOES NOT WORK! CALL IMMEDIATELY!”

The files were fine. They just didn’t know what they were doing. 

My client came back to me for their next project.