reflections

Today’s been a rotten day. The phone has not stopped ringing, I have had nasty emails from people accusing me of things I haven’t even done, I am still trying to debug masses of code - and to end the day I spent 3 hours on the phone to a prospect, repeatedly explaining something that a kid would grasp in 5 minutes.

It was during my exhausting conversation with the prospect that I had a strong sense of deja-vu. When he hung up, I realised that I’d had a client just like him years ago. In fact, clients and prospects seem to fit a few generic types - for me at least! These are my personal top five…

The Snail

These clients can make or (more often) break freelance designers. They do this by paying your invoices six weeks after the really, completely, absolutely latest date you can possibly accept payment - and ironically they are usually the ones who get their deliverables on time, every time. Maybe I should try the “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” method of invoice negotiation instead?

The Charity Case

I’ve done my fair share of unpaid work for charities in the past, and I’ve really enjoyed most of it - but this is something else entirely. These clients make paid projects totally unprofitable for you, because they take far more time and effort than you’re actually getting paid for! This problem comes in many flavours: demands for reduced prices and asking for extra unpaid (out-of-hours) support are the two I come across most often.

The Invertebrate

These guys will blindly accept anything you say, provide anything you ask for, pay you more money if you say you need it, and wait for weeks past the deadline before they call to ask how you’re getting on. So these should be the perfect client, right? Wrong! I should love these clients, but they bring out the worst in me! When doing a project for an invertebrate it’s guaranteed that I’ll be at my most lazy, unmotivated, uncaring level… It’s quite a scary metamorphosis!

The Lo-Tech

These are the ones who frequently make a face like they’ve just seen you eat your own nose - when all you’ve actually done is talked about email, social networking, blogging or web accessibility. They refer to video recorders as “Xerox machines”, think broadband is a new radio frequency, and ask for everything to be printed out on foolscap and posted to them.

The Pixel-Shifter

I hate these guys the most. I’ve spent six months trying to create a simple business card for one, and then bolted when they’ve asked me to rework their logo! After showing them any kind of design, they will typically say something like: “Could you move that down half a millimetre. Hmmmm. Now move this left an eighth of an inch for me. Hmm. Now make the text one point size bigger, and add two percent magenta to that block of colour. Hmmmmmmmm. No - I don’t like that at all. Perhaps you could try a different approach?”

The Conclusion

So… What do you do if you’ve got one of the above client-types on your books? Well, personally I’d give them the boot after you’ve finished any outstanding work for them! There are so many nice, friendly, understanding, helpful clients looking for designers, and I believe that most people can get away with being a bit choosy!

Who have I missed then? What are you stereotypical clients like? Got any clients like mine? Leave a comment and let me know!

[Thanks to Zep, The Paper Bull, Charity, Mike, Aaron, Tara, Lisa and Ludovic for your comments on recent posts]

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I don’t know whether it’s turning 30 that’s done it, or if it’s more to do with my Huntingtons testing, but I found myself yesterday thinking about organising a reunion of the people I went to Primary school with.

To be honest, it’s not something I’ve seriously considered before. Since I left education in 1997, I’ve only heard from two classmates, and both of those I knew only from Secondary school. I’ve never been sure whether to be unhappy about that or not - after all, I’ve not initiated contact with anyone either!

I asked my wife if she thought a reunion would be a good idea, and she suggested that Primary school reunions in general are usually a bad idea - and that people you knew at that age would be unlikely to be interested in meeting again.

However, I did what I usually do when my wife gives me advice - and I ignored it.

I spent about an hour on various people location sites (including Friends Reunited, and another hour Googling for names I vaguely recalled - and by the end of that I had located three out of 28 class members online, and for all three I found photos of how they look now (amazingly enough all three have barely changed, and were instantly recognisable). I then sent private messages to the people listed on Friends Reunited and called it a night.

Something worked though - and this morning I had an email from somebody I haven’t spoken to in two decades, saying how much she thought meeting up again was a great idea; it turns out she only lives 15 minutes away from me! Then I had another email this afternoon, from another. Between myself and the second classmate, we’ve managed to put a full name to nearly everybody in the photo (the only one I have now, and awful quality because it was scanned so long ago). I’m the one in the red jumper by the way…

So now begins the hard part - finding everybody and making contact. Then pulling them all together, at a venue we can all get to, and quickly too - so that everybody involved doesn’t get tired of the idea before it happens! I’ve already had a couple of lucky hits on Google this evening, so it’s going well so far - although I don’t think for one moment that it’s going to be an easy thing to pull off!

The thing that fascinates me most about this experience so far, is how the children who shone within the confines of school, simply faded when faced with the harsh lights of the adult world. Others, those who were often shy and withdrawn at school, appear to have managed the transformation to adulthood with both grace and enthusiasm.

I look forward to testing this assumption when I meet them all in person.

Have you participated in a school reunion? How did it go? Perhaps you’ve organised one yourself - how did that work out? Got any tips, or great websites to share for reunion organisation?

[Thank you to Tara, David, Zep and Charity for your comments on my previous post]

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