Whew! Twelve-hour day yesterday, but I made significant progress on the large project. One more task to complete and I may, God willing, be able to pass it off to them next week.
My long-time chum Kirk over at All That Is Necessary has a fun post about the weird stuff employers have asked us to do while on the clock. In typical Kirk fashion, he’s shown us how employers can fixate on the minutiae, wasting valuable time/talent/dollars to answer some pretty bizarre questions or solve impossible riddles.
Piggybacking off his idea, let me ask you this: what was the strangest client request/demand you’ve ever fielded? Give details. Leave out names to protect the guilty, but do share. We’ve all had some nutty requests.
A few of the weird things I’ve had to do or have been asked to do:
1. Looked up jargon. During the dot com boom, I was employed as an editor. The press releases suddenly went from “Joe Smith promoted to VP” to “Acme Solutions releases its new robust, fully scalable, cross-platform, end-to-end user-friendly software solution designed to streamline the risk management function and drive mission critical value propositions.” Yea, huh? As I shared on Kirk’s thread, I looked those terms up (they were all shiny and new then), and realized I still didn’t get what these people did. And upon asking, neither did their PR people. I admit that I took great pleasure in watching these guys squirm and repeat mechanically when I asked for an explanation. Stupidity in others, or any sign of a snow job, makes me evil.
2. Write an insurance licensing course from scratch – with no guidance. This was a Project from Hell. The client wanted insurance licensing courses for his online site. Great! Only the amount of work was astronomical, and the artificial deadline was impossible to meet. Not to mention that even with the help of five others, it took months. For what we were paid and given the lack of guidance and, oh, the hissy fit he took when I mistyped the number of pages, telling him we’d completed 152 instead of the 252 we were actually at, it was not worth it. At all. Best, he knew we’d completed more than that because I always attached the entire project so he could see where we were. And no apology for overreacting. Thanks. Next!
3. Write an article on pedophilia (and then watch my publication fold and you never hear from me again). I’ll admit this one was fascinating. I was able to email a number of admitted pedophiles in various countries and hear what they had to say about what they consider to be “normal” behavior. I won’t risk offending you guys with the stories, but it was bizarre and it forced me to suspend judgment when I was really wanting to vomit and shout at them. But I did get to ask them all – the objects of your affections obviously grow up. What then? Every one of these guys said they’d lose interest at puberty. (If you want to know more, write me personally. I won’t subject everyone to these sordid tales.) But the dude who assigned the article disappeared completely, magazine and all, the minute I delivered the story.
4. Let me put you on retainer to write whatever I want – just send me your bank account number so I can transfer the funds. File my response to this in the not-born-yesterday category, for the dude was dangling a large amount of money in front of me. I checked him out, but I wasn’t completely convinced he was legit. Let’s just say his name appeared under a lot of new business opportunities and only one established company. He came to me a few days after another scam artist had visited, one that is now in jail. Even if he hadn’t, he was getting my PayPal address. He complained that PayPal didn’t allow him to transfer such large amounts. Then send me a check, I countered. Never heard from him again. What a surprise.
You? Any odd things happened in your career, either freelance or full-time?
Okay, my weird story pales in comparison, but I had a client this summer bragging about being a millionaire ask me to not nly handle all of his blog posts and marketing material, but run his blog radio program as well for a rate that only a college intern working for a grade and the hands on experience could appreciate. I immediately broke it off.
Thanks for the plug, amiga 🙂
Now you’ve got me thinking about other fun assignment stories. A client asked me if I could write a business plan for them. “Of course!”, I said… the standard consultant response to any question of the form “can you help me with _____.”
As the words were coming out of my mouth, it occurred to me that not only had I never written a business plan — I had never READ one. (The client was a friend, so I disclosed this — thereby violating the consulting Prime Directive.)
My research assistant (Mr. Google) quickly discovered that the federal Small Business Administration has a foolproof recipe for how to bake a business plan.
Copy and paste section headers, sprinkle liberally with specifics, and microwave until hot. The client was thrilled with the result.
#4 sounds suspiciously like an offer I received once . . . he wanted to pay me via his bank’s online billpay system, and insisted that he needed my account and routing number to make the payments. I know better, and told him he could just sign me up as a vendor with my business name and address, and his bank would cut me an actual check.