By : James Chartrand
Clients from hell. We’ve all had them, right?
There’s the client who doesn’t get it, the client who’s cheap, the client who’s nasty, the client who asks too much, the client who doesn’t give us enough, the client who wants it all yesterday, the client who pays in two years, the client who doesn’t understand value, the client who treats you badly, the client who lacks two bits of brain to rub together…
Yeah. The list goes on. Clients from hell are the people we all hope we never do business with. Ever, ever, ever.
And we fight back. We protect each other. We freelancers like to stick together, so we use our blogs and our voice and our social media accounts and we write a bunch of posts telling other freelancers the red-flag signals and alarm-bell warnings.
We go the extra mile, too. We tell each other how to deal with these clients from hell, how to get out of sticky situations, how to fire these clients and how to retain our dignity (as well as our hard-earned reputation, money and time).
We’re so helpful on telling the world about these clients from hell that at the time of writing this post, a single Google search on the phrase “clients from hell” returned 9,400,000 results.
There’s even a Twitter account about it.
Nine million four hundred thousand results. Pretty astounding. That many clients from hell? Take arms, freelancers! Unite, and fight against these heathen creatures who seek to destroy us!
Before I grabbed my pitchfork, though, I got curious. How many Google search results could I find on “freelancers from hell”?
132,000.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Now I know that we freelancers may all like to think that we’re professionalism personified when it comes to the business relationship. We offer the utmost respect to each person we deal with, and behave at all times like ladies and lords of the court. We tell ourselves we’re angels, because clearly we are – the numbers are there to back us up!
But let’s face it: that isn’t the truth.
The truth is that freelancers can be just as evil as clients. We get tired, and cranky, and fed up, and irritated, and we say stupid things at the wrong time. We have knee jerk reactions. We get lofty. We get defensive. We screw up. We behave like children.
(Well, not me, of course. Unless it’s a Sunday. On Sundays, all bets are off.)
Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that we were better than everyone else, but at the end of the day, we’re just people. Human beings, the same kind as our clients. We’re not a different breed at all. We have the same faults and weaknesses, the same bad habits and behaviors, and we share these downfalls of humanity with other people, no matter who they are.
Clients included.
“But James! The proof is right there!” Yes, it appears so, doesn’t it? 9, 400,000 search results on Luciferic clients. And only 132,000 freelancers from the same burning-pit-of-hell.
Then again, I’m a copywriter. Of all people out there, I know that you should never believe everything I read.
So I dug a little deeper. I thought to myself, “Well, maybe there are just more clients than there are freelancers.” That would be a nice explanation to the imbalance.
But as quickly as the thought came, I had to squash it. If you look at the number of applications every client receives for each available project or job, you’ll quickly see that there are far more people looking for work than there are people offering it. If there truly were more clients than freelancers, we’d probably all be retiring in Tahiti at the age of 30.
Anyone? Anyone…? Yeah. I didn’t think so.
Another thought I had was that maybe clients don’t have the ability to spread the word about freelancer evils. They couldn’t tell others about us, possibly. They lack writing skills, or maybe they didn’t have the tools and resources we do.
Well, that didn’t hold much water. Most clients have businesses, and they have all sorts of ways to keep in touch, communicate and network. They have Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, blogs full of content, and forums where they could post all sorts of “Atchung!” warnings. And it couldn’t be lack of writing skills either. Many clients have writing skills equal to the average freelancer.
So it’s not the message, it’s not the medium, and it’s not the masses. What, then?
I puzzled it over for a while and thought of all sorts of reasons there might be more warnings about clients from hell than freelancers from hell, but each one got tossed out just as quickly as it came.
The last possible reason, though… Well, it stuck. It didn’t have a counter-argument – not much of one, anyways. It was logical, it was plausible, and it was the only thought left that might provide the answer to this intriguing situation:
Maybe clients just have more manners.
What do you think?
Job Vacancy , Indonesia Job , Job Indonesia
Clients from hell. We’ve all had them, right?
There’s the client who doesn’t get it, the client who’s cheap, the client who’s nasty, the client who asks too much, the client who doesn’t give us enough, the client who wants it all yesterday, the client who pays in two years, the client who doesn’t understand value, the client who treats you badly, the client who lacks two bits of brain to rub together…
Yeah. The list goes on. Clients from hell are the people we all hope we never do business with. Ever, ever, ever.
And we fight back. We protect each other. We freelancers like to stick together, so we use our blogs and our voice and our social media accounts and we write a bunch of posts telling other freelancers the red-flag signals and alarm-bell warnings.
We go the extra mile, too. We tell each other how to deal with these clients from hell, how to get out of sticky situations, how to fire these clients and how to retain our dignity (as well as our hard-earned reputation, money and time).
We’re so helpful on telling the world about these clients from hell that at the time of writing this post, a single Google search on the phrase “clients from hell” returned 9,400,000 results.
There’s even a Twitter account about it.
Nine million four hundred thousand results. Pretty astounding. That many clients from hell? Take arms, freelancers! Unite, and fight against these heathen creatures who seek to destroy us!
Before I grabbed my pitchfork, though, I got curious. How many Google search results could I find on “freelancers from hell”?
132,000.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Now I know that we freelancers may all like to think that we’re professionalism personified when it comes to the business relationship. We offer the utmost respect to each person we deal with, and behave at all times like ladies and lords of the court. We tell ourselves we’re angels, because clearly we are – the numbers are there to back us up!
But let’s face it: that isn’t the truth.
The truth is that freelancers can be just as evil as clients. We get tired, and cranky, and fed up, and irritated, and we say stupid things at the wrong time. We have knee jerk reactions. We get lofty. We get defensive. We screw up. We behave like children.
(Well, not me, of course. Unless it’s a Sunday. On Sundays, all bets are off.)
Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that we were better than everyone else, but at the end of the day, we’re just people. Human beings, the same kind as our clients. We’re not a different breed at all. We have the same faults and weaknesses, the same bad habits and behaviors, and we share these downfalls of humanity with other people, no matter who they are.
Clients included.
“But James! The proof is right there!” Yes, it appears so, doesn’t it? 9, 400,000 search results on Luciferic clients. And only 132,000 freelancers from the same burning-pit-of-hell.
Then again, I’m a copywriter. Of all people out there, I know that you should never believe everything I read.
So I dug a little deeper. I thought to myself, “Well, maybe there are just more clients than there are freelancers.” That would be a nice explanation to the imbalance.
But as quickly as the thought came, I had to squash it. If you look at the number of applications every client receives for each available project or job, you’ll quickly see that there are far more people looking for work than there are people offering it. If there truly were more clients than freelancers, we’d probably all be retiring in Tahiti at the age of 30.
Anyone? Anyone…? Yeah. I didn’t think so.
Another thought I had was that maybe clients don’t have the ability to spread the word about freelancer evils. They couldn’t tell others about us, possibly. They lack writing skills, or maybe they didn’t have the tools and resources we do.
Well, that didn’t hold much water. Most clients have businesses, and they have all sorts of ways to keep in touch, communicate and network. They have Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, blogs full of content, and forums where they could post all sorts of “Atchung!” warnings. And it couldn’t be lack of writing skills either. Many clients have writing skills equal to the average freelancer.
So it’s not the message, it’s not the medium, and it’s not the masses. What, then?
I puzzled it over for a while and thought of all sorts of reasons there might be more warnings about clients from hell than freelancers from hell, but each one got tossed out just as quickly as it came.
The last possible reason, though… Well, it stuck. It didn’t have a counter-argument – not much of one, anyways. It was logical, it was plausible, and it was the only thought left that might provide the answer to this intriguing situation:
Maybe clients just have more manners.
What do you think?
Job Vacancy , Indonesia Job , Job Indonesia
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