If you thought my mental health was bad in 2020, let’s travel back to 201X when I had no car, no home (of my own), no employment that was actually paying me, no offline support network at the time, and couldn’t even get hired at the Family Dollar down the street. I was All In during this time– if no one would hire me, then fuck it, I’ll work with my friend (let’s call him Michael) in the IT business. You know, that thing I went to school for.
I was the frontend designer for our clients, while also branching out to customer service, server administration, invoicing, social media managing, and… just shooting the shit as we stayed up late into the night, just working on whatever, putting on terrible movies like Atlantic Rim and Whatever the Fuck That Shamwow Guy Did with the Cameras. I loved those late nights. There were bad nights, too, like when we stayed up for days after a server move had our client’s sites down for that long. When we couldn’t sue the guy that used my artwork because our backups went up in smoke so we couldn’t prove our case. And hours cussing out [INSERT MONOPOLY INTERNET PROVIDER HERE] under our breath as they gave us the runaround.
And the clients.
Most were… fine. They just had us do backend stuff, update here and there, and call it a day. We never hear from them other than a request. Those clients got into our portfolio. But it was the other fuckers… the ones that were profoundly difficult, that went into another sort of book. One you could, say, burn. A Mean Girls reference, if you will.
They really didn’t help the mental health.
The worst ones would be hurling insults and outrageous shit. Michael, being far more charismatic that I was, took most of the phone calls– and the abuse. Fortunately, he gave as good as he got– if not better– and we’d zipfile them their intellectual property and tell them to fuck off. But then there were the Memorable Ones that still stick on my claw (or however the saying goes).
The Textile Jerk This one I was really proud of, my first solid responsive layout. I have tested extensively and even utilized lightbox. But when it came time to pay the second half of the invoice, he refused, claiming that the code sucked, the layout sucked, the colors sucked– but somehow, did not say a word about this despite our preliminary mockups and design queries.
The Pixel Pusher If a button was one pixel away from the one beside it, we’d get a call about it. They went back and forth on color changes. They threw an absolute fit when this border looked slightly different in IE than Firefox. A fucking nightmare.
The Equus ferus caballus That Couldn’t This was to be our magnum opus. We were getting into Ruby on Rails, and it was a delightful process. We had a beautiful layout, chill color scheme, video intro, the works. We even committed the cardinal sin of throwing in extra flourishes and work because we were passionate about the project. Everything seemed great. Until a new name entered our communications and started tearing everything down (I suspect clashes on their end). The project halted, and it never got off the ground.
The Amusing One It just had the sort of thing designers snicker at– a photographer with a lot of books being set on fire or something. But hey, that’s what he wanted, and that’s what I remember him for. It could have been a lot worse. Oh, and this solidified my hatred for coding for Flash. But that wasn’t his fault.
The Discount Palpatine I shit you not this dude was trying some weird ass Jedi mindtricks or psychological hypnosis, intoning phrases strangely. After our conference call I went "What the hell was he doing!?" Michael told me some of the more sinister subliminal nonsense salespeople like to try. The app they wanted? Gambling related.
Honorable mentions go to the companies we had business dinners with, or started off on great footing… only to dissolve, disappear, or get arrested and thrown in jail for fraud.
And we had one client foolish enough to refuse to pay us, so we just shut off their server. Legally, it was probably bad form, but still hilarious in a petty way.
So… that was what we were dealing with.
I put up boundaries. I paced myself. I made sure to step away and refused to work weekends. But it wasn’t enough. It all grew too much and I was let go from my own company because I was spiraling so badly, beyond burnout… and I couldn’t be paid for what I was doing, anyway. We couldn’t afford me. The company eventually folded, but Michael lasted much longer than I did.
Until a business partner stole $10,000 from him.
Ultimately, as usual, all of our ills came down to money. They didn’t want to pay what the service actually cost– if they wanted to pay at all. Chargebacks were a common occurrence, with Paypal siding with the customer more often than not. Scope Creep was constant battle and like Textile Jerk, suddenly had excuses to put off paying the bill.
I don’t miss that shit.
BONUS: for more horror stories, read Clients from Hell.