Re: Round #4263 with the Client From Hell

["Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>]

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Dick Margulis  wrote:
> However, there is another school of thought that says the customer is
> not always right, and that Clients From Hell can be so disruptive to
> your business, so demoralizing to your employees, and so expensive to
> service, that the best course of action is to dump them
> unceremoniously. If you can collect a few bucks in court in the
> process, so much the better. The basis of this position is that caving
> to bullies, like voting, only encourages the bastards.

I find the connection between this point--well-taken, BTW--
and the need for business classes to be most interesting.

When I first started as a technical writer, I had one of
these clients from hell (I was contracting while looking
for a full-time position). After the third iteration of
 - "Our style calls for eliminating all articles"
 - "This sounds really stilted without articles. Why did you do
    that, and how long to fix it?"
 - "We have a new style guideline calling for omitting all
    articles" (Really--I couldn't make that up.)
I finally got the darn book in. Per the contract, I was
supposed to show up for a round-table review, then
make the needed corrections, then resubmit.
They told me when the review was about 24 hours before
it started...six months after the initial submission.
By this time, of course, I had a fulltime job, and my
boss really wouldn't have supported giving me a day
off to wrapup contract work. I told them I couldn't make
it to the scheduled time, and suggested that perhaps
with more than 24 hours notice, I might be able to be
more accommodating. My CFH hung up on me.

I was plagued by guilt over that for years....no kidding.
I was so thoroughly in the "customer is always right"
mindset that I really didn't "get it" that the customer
could be just plain wrong. Furthermore, I had so little
business experience that I didn't realize that
contracts are broken or renegotiated every day, that
it's impossible to make some people happy (and worthless
to try), and that a failed vendor/client relationship
doesn't reflect on the vendor necessarily (unless there's
a pattern).

Based on my experience, real world business experience/
exposure is a key component of a complete tech writer
education. Business needs drive everything--or they
should.

Eric
ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com


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