clients

Condolences

Blog kitt decided around 14:46 on 18 February 2009 to publish this:

I find it odd the number of people who express condolences to me for another coworker being laid off. Sure, I figured out the company was going to have layoffs a few hours before the company did have layoffs last week, which resulted in a slightly awkward situation for me. Sure, I worked closely with one of the people laid off, but giving me condolences on HIS losing HIS job?

Makes no sense to me.

Yeah, I know that, too

Blog kitt decided around 13:16 on 5 March 2008 to publish this:

How much must it suck to discover you can't bullshit a coworker in a different department at work?

A client of mine works at a large enough company that the company has its own IT department. We were adding a new website for the company, and needed a new host added for the company (which means, Mom, you can go to newhost.example.com as well as www.example.com - the "newhost" and the "www" are host names for the domain example.com).

The client requested the host name change, which the IT department provided last week. The IT department then messed up and reverted the change at some point, losing the new host name. This was after my client had announced to various places the new site, at the new host name, was up. So, now the new site is down.

So, the client contacts the IT department and nicely says, "WTF? Put back the host name, please." The IT department responds with a "We did. It'll take a day to notice the change." Except, they didn't. How do we know? Well, my client looked up the information. If you know where to look, you can see the updated changes as they are saved. The IT department made the changes, took back the changes, then didn't put them back again when requested.

And were caught.

My client called them on it. Using the IT department's own tools.

How much must it suck to discover that, hey, yeah, your coworkers know how to do your job?

They just don't want to do it.

So much for that attempt

Blog kitt decided around 19:21 on 7 July 2006 to publish this:

And, after all that work, I managed to lose the client anyway.

If I had known in the end that I was going to lose the client, I wouldn't have worked the 100+ hours on the project. Nor would I have missed half the July 4th festivities at Adam's, the after wedding fun, the various ultimate practices, the extra time at communal dinner, the runs and the sleep. I would have said, screw it, the grapes are sour anyway, and enjoyed the last two weeks.

Though, probably feeling guilty the whole time.

The day started off crappy, with my staying up until 6 in the morning trying to finish a site feature that later in the day I found out wasn't actually in the original statement of work. Essentially, I was done on Monday, but the client confused two projects, and insisted a feature be added. I didn't realize it shouldn't be, and spent the last four days trying to put it in. Nothing like finding out Monday at 9:30 PM that a feature needs to be in by, oh, that day's morning to add stress to a project.

Yesterday, I had sent a note to the client letting them know I couldn't work Thursday or Friday on the current project that's been sucking up all my time, but that I'd be working on the client's other projects. Instead of being thankful for the heads up, they completely freaked, called up Mike on his vacation, demanded he contact me.

Because, you know, Mike is my dad and he tells me what to do.

The worse part is that I ended up spending all of Thursday working on the same project anyway.

I give up. I'm done with clients. As soon as I finish up the current projects for current clients, I'm not planning on taking on any more. If some amazing client project comes along, I'll probably take it. But I'm not seeking any new clients out.

Instead, I'm going to work on our projects, build our products up. Finally, finally, finally. Our work.