Perhaps it was just my mood this week, but I am close to dropping another client. In the past year, I’ve developed an online resource management and monitoring system for this company. For a mission critical online app, this has got to be one of the cheapest I’ve charged out.

Anyway, my old contact must have been removed. It had been months since I’ve heard anything from them and well, I was too busy to do the old marketing call and there were very rarely calls for technical support on the app – such is the benefit of creating unit tested applications that do as they should.

I receive a call while at my full time position and it was (I guess) the replacement for my contact at the company.

I spoke with the contact who requests that I come in. I told the contact that I’m unable to do so and that I dealt with their predecessor through electronic correspondence.

So a day or so later I receive an email with requested changes. Along with jabs at the application saying that it is actually slowing down their productivity. Anyone can say that I suppose, I’d even go so far in saying that it is a fair call. I disagreed, but carried out some feature requests and layout decisions made and detailed by their company and the contact’s predecessors.

So to start throwing it at me at this stage is a classic case of barking up the wrong tree. Early signs of power tripping micro-management and something which I care very little for.

I decide to pick up on the comment and try to defuse it saying that the application is an ever changing thing what’s good yesterday is not so good today. I divide the task list she provided to managable chunks and sent a quote, followed by a timeline.

The contact then returns with the micro managerial attitude of “I’ll be expecting it at [so and so time] then” – Well of course! that’s what I stated. This isn’t some amateur hour operation, these details are taken for granted.

The contact then continues to express that if I am unable to deliver sooner, in the future, they will have to seek out assistance from elsewhere.

This is when I heard a click in my ear. “Drop ‘em”.

Seriously, I really don’t understand what this person or people who have this kind of attitude expect.

I reply with a stern recommendation that they seek assistance elsewhere. I offered to honour the then approved proposal and see where we stand upon it’s completion. Basically, to sum things up in a nutshell, I told the contact that if this was the attitude they were going to have, then I don’t have time for them. Go find someone else.

Once bitten twice shy I suppose. The company I used to work for had the “pleasure of serving” one of the biggest sporting outfits in New South Wales and being the sole developer who had developed the CRM, CMS and Managed their website, I had to deal with the Public Relations Manager who had the same “master, slave” mentality.

This “PR” person literally was the wrong person for the job. For someone in public relations, this person had no people skills and was somewhat illiterate. He yelled and screamed at myself, the web designer and the account managers who, in his mind, were there to “serve” him and his ego.

We took it, big money after all dictates we take it. It got worse as the years passed by and eventually, the PR person got around a certain clause in our contract with his organisation by asking us to quote on one thing and another web development company to quote on another. After all that, In the end, it was all for nothing. The PR person who was a total disaster didn’t want to be with us and they screwed us and I expect my client to do the same.

Back on rant – I offer a service. It’s not a green light to start power tripping on me. Maybe that was big in the nineties, but hey, things change. You are MY client. I’m not YOUR slave or sh*tkicker. Let’s just get things clear, it’s a business relationship. Not a master, slave relationship.

In my mind, I’ve dropped them already, after the first iteration, I’ll think about taking them back.