What I’m reading: Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
What’s on the iPod: The Twist by Frightened Rabbit
Like that? I thought it might be fun to share what we’re reading and listening to.
Spent a great Friday off with a writer friend I’ve known for a while, but never met. She and I hit it off beautifully and I suspect as we dig deeper we’ll realize how many connections we have. For now, I’m enjoying knowing her. What a neat person!
One of the things we talked about was our clients and some of the challenges we have had. I didn’t bring this one up, but I’ve had passive-aggressive clients. That’s not fun. One in particular I think is still trying to torture me even though it’s been years since I worked on that one project.
It may have been because I had to remind him to pay my invoice and had by then attached two late fees. He chastised me for not mailing it when we’d done everything to date in email. He claimed it went to his Spam folder. See, I’d believe that, but he obviously saw that last one…. sometimes when they tell you a fib, it’s really easy to see through it.
He paid all but the late fees (naturally), and then he started sending me referrals. Great, right? I thought so, too. Then I met the clients. One was – how can I say it? Crazy. I did like him, but his project was so off-the-wall, much like his behavior, and I was pretty sure the help he needed was beyond my capacity. I know only basic first aid…
Another client was great, but he had a habit of over-sharing. I didn’t care to know about his sexual orientation, nor his gender identity crisis. I’m okay with it, but it’s not relevant to the project and it’s certainly not appropriate small talk for our first conversation and only three minutes in. His project was also full of large holes – he was trying to prove to me that he’d been framed and targeted for murder, but the more he talked, the less I was convinced. The “facts” he was laying out simply didn’t add up.
Still another had personal goals mixed in with professional goals and wanted me to fix both his life and his business. With a book. Buh-bye.
While it may be pure coincidence that my former client is sending these people my way and they’re turning out to be bad fits for me, I’m doubtful. He’s in a similar business to mine. He could easily take on two of those three clients as they fit his business model much more than mine.
What do you do when someone targets you for this kind of harassment? And maybe for me, harassment would be too strong a word. But we’ve had clients who tend to chastise, withhold payment forever, talk down to us, treat us like servants or worse – employees, etc. How do you overcome it?
You don’t reward it. When one of my clients hit the panic button every three minutes and flooded my in box with several emails instead of one, I refused to answer until the emails slowed to a halt. Maybe that’s passive-aggressive on my part, but I would rather read them all at once and respond in ONE email than put together a dozen emails with a dozen conversations going on at the same time. When this particular client sends me a referral, I call and ask questions. I allow ten minutes tops. After that I’ll know if it’s a fit or another attempt to get a dig in.
Do I think clients can hold grudges and punish? Oh yes. I had a boss like that once and it ended when I got a different job. Everyone saw it, too. A few of her managerial colleagues even approached her about why I was on her “list”, to which she batted her eyelashes and feigned ignorance. So it makes sense that clients in our freelance realm can have similar tendencies.
Have you been punished by a client lately?
11 responses to “The Passive-aggressive Client”
Not lately, but over ten years ago I had a weird feeling about an editor. She'd joined the staff of a start-up about six months after the senior editor. While the senior editor assigned me a wide range of articles and ran them nearly verbatim, the new editor pigeonholed me into the magazine's dullest subject areas. She practically re-write every one of my articles to sound as if she'd written in.
I started getting the feeling that she simply didn't like me (and I consider myself a very friendly-yet-professional person). She was brusque on the phone, kept assigning me the stories no one else wanted, and never commented on my work, good or bad. When I questioned why she was offering me less per article than the senior editor paid me, she said it was because my writing required heavy editing. I said, "Funny that the senior editor doesn't agree with that."
After that she seemed to lighten up a bit. But clearly she was punishing me for something – not churning out copy that sounded as if she'd written it, or being too friendly (or not friendly enough), or something else entirely. I'll never know why she treated me the way she did, but I've always wondered what her problem was.
Of course I meant to type in "re-wrote" not "re-write." D'uh!
Paula, sometimes they're threatened by friendly people. I don't get it. Sounds to me like she was insecure about her own abilities and took it out on you.
Try finding yourself in the middle of a husband and wife business squabble.
Hubby sends encouraging, "This is great!" emails, while the wife sends the critiques of every little thing you did, that technically make no sense.
Then, when it's all said and done and all payments have been made to my account, an email comes zipping to the inbox from the irate wife. How dare I flirt with her hubby. Apparently, Thank-You's are considered flirting. Go figure.
Hubby wants to continue with my writing services, but dear ol' wife puts more demands on me, asking me to limit what I say and how I do other things. Sorry, I don't operate that way. You'll have to find someone else. I'd rather not get stuck in their personal problems. Thank You.
She accused you of flirting? Is she nuts? No wait – don't answer that. Rhetorical question. 🙂
Reading: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
Listening to: Scarpetta (on my iPod) and Songs of the Humpback Whale (in my car)
I'm so prone to earworms, I skip music in favor of audiobooks.
Lori,
I've been blessed with wonderful clients, but I when I was editor for an online publishing company, I was harassed by a writer.
He sent in a manuscript that needed a lot of work. He became very angry when I sent it back with revision notes and started sending me threatening e-mails. Then he subscribed me to the vilest porn spam.
Every day, my junk mailbox was filled with the most explicit and offensive stuff you can imagine, and my inbox was full of his threatening messages. I actually copied this trash to CDs for awhile because I really thought I might need evidence of the harassment in case he carried through with any of the threats.
I also forwarded messages to his ISP and got them to close his account.
Not long afteward, I saw a posting from him on a forum about how terrible I was—he sent me a wonderful manuscript, and I wanted him to make changes that would totally destroy it, etc. I just ignored that because he didn't make any threats, and I didn't see anything else.
That kind of behavior is scary, whether it's a client or a writer.
Lillie, that's awful! Did you simply ignore him? Sometimes they bore of their own harassment. Sorry you went through that. 🙁
Amie, do you love the book? I'm always looking for new reads.
Lori,
I didn't respond to him at all but reported him to his ISP and sent copies of some of the e-mails. They closed his e-mail account, and it took him a while to get another one. In fact, that was one of his complaints in the forum post about how horrible I was. He said I caused him to lose his Internet access and e-mail.
When he got back online, I never heard from him again directly, and that one forum posting was the only other time I heard of him.
Lori, I'm finding Mennonite a much more enjoyable than Eat, Pray, Love, which I found to be a pretentious and taxing read…both were recommended to me by the same person, who loved both books and felt they were similar in a lot of ways. Fortunately, the only similarities I've seen so far are that both are memoirs and Elizabeth Gilbert's name appears on both covers (she wrote a jacket blurb for Janzen's book).
I'm a little late to the party! 🙂 I had a marketing client about five years ago who was horrible. She had no idea of how to communicate without screaming and hurling insults. She did this to everyone she came in contact with so I knew it wasn't just me. And she was a Realtor! How she sold houses was beyond me.
Long story short, I ended up "firing" her after one of her famous tirades. When I asked her to speak to me without yelling, she told me not to tell her what to do.
See you later! No amount of money is worth that! I'd rather flip burgers.