clientsfromhell:

I work for an educational program as the jack-of-all-trades (graphic designer, marketer, event planner, etc.). One of my duties this week is to collect the new Power Point slides from the faculty to handouts for the students. The old template was ugly (circular gradient backgrounds) and had no reference to the school, so made a new template and handed it out, asking people to use them. I gave detailed instructions on how to convert their slides, and almost everyone figured it out immediately. Almost. One teacher couldn’t figure this out, so I had to convert all of the slides for him and send them back.

While most teachers’ slides converted just fine, his would require a lot of manual reformatting because he’d used hyphens instead of bullet points, used the space key to align his text – just lots of decisions that meant I had to go in and do it by hand. I offered to do this for him, but apparently that wasn’t good enough.

Client: That’s not going to work, because I have pretty particular needs. I’m not sure I have the time to tell you what to do. Can’t I just use the same slides?

Me: I’m sorry, but your slides would be the only ones with the wrong template and it would look unprofessional for the program. Can you just make the changes yourself?

Client: Well I don’t see why I should be expected to make those changes.

After some argument, he begrudgingly agreed to take on the horrible burden of printing his slides, circling what was wrong with them in red ink, and then handing them to me so I could do them.

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