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Stripper | May 07 2004

All my clients these days are good clients. Good clients are people who don’t change things fifty times and who you can tell during an important phone conversation that you need to go pee. Part of the reason my clients are so good these days is that I’ve stopped accepting work from bad clients.

Ah, but how do I know in advance which clients will be bad clients and which good? Answer: I can feel it.

It doesn’t take long for the feeling to sink in. Usually it happens during the first conversation, as I ask about goals and audience and resources.

I don’t ever tell the bad clients what’s going on (e.g., “I’d don’t want this job because you’re a controlling motherfucker who will end up making my life miserable”). That would be rude. Instead I offer some half-plausible excuse and pass them along to friends who can’t afford to be so picky.

It’s taken me years to get this point, and fuck does it feel good. The clincher came this morning when one of my clients (needless to say, a good one) sent me the following email:

I had a nightmare about the website last night. In my dream the website looked exactly like a brochure, although it was still a website. I was at the print run and they kept making mistakes, like printing the front page with our content, while the rest of it was an advertisement for a concert of electronic music. I had a fit and forced them to print it again. After it was printed the second time, I noticed that you had decided to totally change the theme to a cartoon “the Last Supper.” Also, the cuts were very sloppy, and when I went to go check out the cutting situation, it turned out that all the brochures were being cut one-by-one by a stripper with a paper cutter. Then I woke up.