So the client drama that I told you about last week took an interesting twist today…
Earlier this morning hubby had a talk with the client’s (we’ll call her “G”) business partner/investor (let’s call him “V”). Basically the hubs let him know what needed to be done to resolve the issues once and for all. They just need to send us more text and more images and their site will look better. V agreed. We also reassured him that the bilingual capabilities of the site would be up and running by next week. In fact we are updating all of our sites with the latest version of our software which runs a million times faster and is much more user-friendly (I hate that word, it is so over-used). The bilingual functions are part of that upgrade. Hubs also told them that they could pay off the rest of their balance over time. It was all good. V assured him that he would keep G under control and keep her from going off on us again.
Literally a few minutes later G called us to personally apologize for her behavior. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a client apologize to us before, that was a huge surprise.
Then about six hours later we get forwarded email exchange between G and our business partner in the US (he usually handles all client relations but since this client is over here we had been more involved). Her email started out as a request for an additional email server but then totally U-turned into this:
“Anyway your multi language not ready, We wanted to add Flash on web and Q already knows this but now he is telling me that need some one to do it,I mean we have to pay someone for design flash any way, We have pay to you 250USd for beginig I mean before starting web site and I told you that balance will be clear after web fnished. Everything takes too long time with you and be frankly I do not want to continue with your company. I kindly request you to refund of our payment.
What. The. Fuck.
He had already responded and agreed to refund her money, a fact that also took us by surprise. As a company we had never really addressed whether or not we would give refunds, and even though it’s not a huge amount of money, it would be coming straight out of our pockets. I wish he had talked to us before he responded to her, but I know he did it because he was frankly tired of dealing with her bullshit and would rather be rid of her. He also wants to protect us from abusive clients. I can’t say that we disagree, it just came as a total surprise. We did not see this coming. He had already taken down her website by the time I got his email.
I just finished drawing up a contract termination agreement. They get their refund as long as they agree not to use any of the material we created for them. For us it means a lot of hours down the drain, but for her it means she’s basically taken her business back to square one. She don’t even have a logo now.
Le sigh…
Oh well. Sometimes you just can help crazy people.
While I wasn’t enirely shocked to see this, given Dustin Diamond’s erratic behavior over the years, but c’mon, it’s the oldest rule in the magazine biz: Controversy Sells! What was People thinking?
Not only did they crop him out, but if you look closely, they also Photoshopped out the top of his afro. That’s cold.



