The Nutjob Yet Paying Client
Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:25 pm
Over the past couple months, I've been working with a nutter of a client. However, he pays me, is really nice when I can catch up with him, and he's my "small task man" to give me $200 USD fill-in money here or there between my other clients. His tasks take me like 2 hours a piece. But honestly, from some of the tasks he gives me, I am beginning to think he's like autistic or something, or mental, and only thinks he's some important client -- and that, perhaps, he's giving me a portion of his disability income check each month. Nothing against autistic and mental people -- I'm just trying to put together what's going on and it doesn't make sense.
- He's hard to get a hold of. Every time he gives me a task, he says he expects I'll have questions, and so he asks me to give him questions. Indeed every task he gives me, I have questions, but then it takes him like 8 to 10 hours to answer me. This is compounded by the fact that he's on the other side of the Earth from me, so our timezones are all screwed up. He's up when I'm sleeping, and I'm up when he's sleeping.
- Occasionally he speaks just fine in his emails. But most of the time, it's like he's typing the emails on his phone, all lowercase, and in broken English. It's hard to understand him sometimes.
- His website tries to offer affiliate marketing stuff for clients, where he hosts several sites on his servers for them and gives them affiliate marketing tools. However, the HTML is all screwed up, the sentences are incomplete or screwed up, there's waaaaaay too much text on the pages, and the server is super, super slow.
- Sometimes when he gives me a task like, "clone this LP [landing page] for me," the landing page is a cool design and I think it's worth his while. Sometimes, however, he asks me to clone a design that makes absolutely no sense at all because the original design is LOL just wrong, wrong, wrong. I do it anyway, even though it makes no sense.
- Evidently he has outstanding Flash and Photoshop skills. I've been impressed with his Flash work and wonder how he does it. But in the Photoshop stuff, he gives me what looks like a free template that originally probably looked nice, but then he redesigns and redesigns into something lousy with only a hint of looking nice here or there. I mean, he gives me a PSD, expecting me to chop it into XHTML/CSS, and the menus are all different colors when he meant it to be a single color, and some of the links are like bright blue when let's say the rest of the site have the links in bright pink.
- He asked me to chat with him online. I told him that I can chat either on IRC in a private chat room, or on my Gmail ID or AOL ID. He says he doesn't want to do that -- he wants me, instead, to chat with him on a web page he has. I think, oh, that's nice, we can do that. But when I get there, it's a 3 column layout, the left column is waaaaay too thin, the gadgets on the page are not drag and drop, and I can only see like two words at a time and 3 lines long. It's almost not possible for me to think in such a chat window. Finally I told him this wasn't working for me and asked if we could switch to some other chat system. I suggest to him how he can install an IRC client and then I can create a chat room on Freenode like #adslfkjas. Then, when we connect, I can PM him from there and he and I can have a private conversation. But no go -- he never gets back to me on that and just emails me a new task, instead, in a couple days. When I've been ignored on a topic, and someone continues to hand me cash, I never bring up old issues and I just move on, doing the new task. So, this was a very strange experience.
Anyone of you freelancers have a nutter of a client like this?
- He's hard to get a hold of. Every time he gives me a task, he says he expects I'll have questions, and so he asks me to give him questions. Indeed every task he gives me, I have questions, but then it takes him like 8 to 10 hours to answer me. This is compounded by the fact that he's on the other side of the Earth from me, so our timezones are all screwed up. He's up when I'm sleeping, and I'm up when he's sleeping.
- Occasionally he speaks just fine in his emails. But most of the time, it's like he's typing the emails on his phone, all lowercase, and in broken English. It's hard to understand him sometimes.
- His website tries to offer affiliate marketing stuff for clients, where he hosts several sites on his servers for them and gives them affiliate marketing tools. However, the HTML is all screwed up, the sentences are incomplete or screwed up, there's waaaaaay too much text on the pages, and the server is super, super slow.
- Sometimes when he gives me a task like, "clone this LP [landing page] for me," the landing page is a cool design and I think it's worth his while. Sometimes, however, he asks me to clone a design that makes absolutely no sense at all because the original design is LOL just wrong, wrong, wrong. I do it anyway, even though it makes no sense.
- Evidently he has outstanding Flash and Photoshop skills. I've been impressed with his Flash work and wonder how he does it. But in the Photoshop stuff, he gives me what looks like a free template that originally probably looked nice, but then he redesigns and redesigns into something lousy with only a hint of looking nice here or there. I mean, he gives me a PSD, expecting me to chop it into XHTML/CSS, and the menus are all different colors when he meant it to be a single color, and some of the links are like bright blue when let's say the rest of the site have the links in bright pink.
- He asked me to chat with him online. I told him that I can chat either on IRC in a private chat room, or on my Gmail ID or AOL ID. He says he doesn't want to do that -- he wants me, instead, to chat with him on a web page he has. I think, oh, that's nice, we can do that. But when I get there, it's a 3 column layout, the left column is waaaaay too thin, the gadgets on the page are not drag and drop, and I can only see like two words at a time and 3 lines long. It's almost not possible for me to think in such a chat window. Finally I told him this wasn't working for me and asked if we could switch to some other chat system. I suggest to him how he can install an IRC client and then I can create a chat room on Freenode like #adslfkjas. Then, when we connect, I can PM him from there and he and I can have a private conversation. But no go -- he never gets back to me on that and just emails me a new task, instead, in a couple days. When I've been ignored on a topic, and someone continues to hand me cash, I never bring up old issues and I just move on, doing the new task. So, this was a very strange experience.
Anyone of you freelancers have a nutter of a client like this?