'They literally said "The stars weren't aligned" for that date': 20+ Clients who had workers laughing behind their backs

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jul 10, 2023 3:00 PM EDT

One person asked workers to spill their "worst/funniest/strangest client story," and so many people had great anecdotes to share. 

If you can't do a job yourself, you hire someone to do it for you. Maybe you're opening a new business and you're searching for a graphic designer to make you a nice logo, or your company wants to send out a newsletter, but doesn't know quite how to perfect it. In that case, it's a great option to hire a freelancer to help you out. That way you can work with someone one on one, and this person should know exactly how to get you the results you're looking for. 

However, as the freelancers/employees below know, not every client relationship is meant to last. Lots of clients have little respect for the work these employees are doing. Sometimes your clients can turn on you if they aren't 100% satisfied with your work, and then they start to say they could actually do this on their own. Oh, really? Then why did you hire someone to design your website in the first place, if you're so great at doing that on your own?

At least the people below, who answered u/D*mn8ti0n's prompt to r/AskReddit, have some hilarious stories to tell about the various clients they've had to work with. Some are uninformed, others are technologically challenged, and some just have no idea what they actually want from their projects, leading to lots of eye rolls behind the scenes. 

Next up, this person disliked the group project they were put into, so they took some screenshots and recorded some voicemails to prove their point. 

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  • 01
    Table - TULE AAN 144 BO
    via Blake Wisz on Unsplash
  • 02
    Font - As a young professional, I am still getting used to dealing with clients. But today took the cake in terms of idiocy. Whats your worst/funniest/strangest client story? As a graphic designer I have to deal with alot of people basically destroying all the hard work me and my coworkers put into a project. At first, I couldn't handle it, now I just find it funny to see where a project goes. But today, I had a client yell at me for telling me that the images we used were too low res for their
    via u/D*mn8ti0n
  • 03
    Font - Client: But I gave you a vector photograph. Me: Photographs do not come in vector files Client: But it was a screen grab, the resolution should be larger than the image. What if I scan my monitor, would that produce a higher quality screen grab? Me: How did you send us the last screen grab? Client: I took a picture of my computer screen with my iPhone.
    via u/D*mn8ti0n
  • 04
    Font - [deleted] "I thought having dual monitors made the computer run faster." Facepalm
    via u/deleted
  • 05
    Font - danger_mcboom A former divorce lawyer here. A client had a change of heart and decided not to go through with the divorce, and instead dismiss the petition and stay married. This was promptly followed up with claims of not being required to pay since I didn't get the divorce as originally planned (even though I spent about 8 months on the case), and nasty voicemails accusing me of trying to break up the marriage in the first place.
    via u/danger_mcboom
  • 06
    Font - [deleted] I do inside sales for an IT consulting company. I had a client that ordered a docking station and keyboard through us. He called me and asked why he couldn't get anything to come up on the screen. Probably because he didn't order af king computer.
    via u/deleted
  • 07
    Font - [deleted] Hahahaha.... I feel your pain! I once made a website for someone, I changed the da colors with him for at least 4 hours. In the end after I told him the color scheme is she said to me: 'I'm color blind and this looks good to me!'
    via u/deleted
  • 08
    Font - [deleted] i new employee (of higher rank and pay than me) brought me a paper document and asked me if I could make an electronic version of it so she could email it to someone. after looking at it, it was obviously recently printed on crisp paper. when i asked her where she got the printout she said she printed it from her computer. i had no idea how to respond. (we both worked in IT)
    via u/deleted
  • 09
    Font - kukukele A client of ours sent out an email to our team which basically resulted in us completely having to redo his tax return. One of the managers on the account replied to our team, about how this client always procrastinated and was a real brash d head. Too bad she sent "reply- all" including our client.
    via u/kukukele
  • 10
    Font - The minutes immediately following her reply were tense. The partner on the account was panicking and she was in tears for her mistake. Lucky her, the client responded with "haha, yeah, I can be a real as e sometimes" and found it hilarious.
    via u/kukukele
  • 11
    Font - [deleted] Oof, it never really stops either. I work a lot with a nonprofit. Good cause, sweet staff, I support them completely and love working with them, but every so often I want to strangle all of them with one long extension cord. Last year I designed an HTML newsletter for them, just cleaning up the info they wanted to send, making it more readable and adding some photos/design elements for emphasis/interest. At the bottom of the e-mail was a table of maybe 20 names with titles/insti
    via u/deleted
  • 12
    Font - I slotted every name into the table, but some of the names were longer than others, some titles were longer, some had institute names, etc, so the visual balance of the names in the table was a bit wonky. Who cares, right? It's a da newsletter, it had time- sensitive information, the names were just there to fill up space. I swear, this nonprofit did at least 12 revisions to that stupid list of names, and in the process delayed their time- sensitive newsletter over 10 days.
    via u/deleted
  • 13
    Font - Their e-mail list was already pretty tiny, less than 2,000 active addresses. If you know anything about newsletters you know that they have fantastically low open- rates. So basically this nonprofit paid for 12 revisions and delayed their newsletter for 10 days so 100 people could enjoy the perfectly-balanced list of names.
    via u/deleted
  • 14
    Font - o ill_mango I was in a spec meeting for some banner ads for a large telecommunications company. The creative guys were giving their concept to the other side of the table, when one of the older gentlemen stops and says, "So the banner will only animate for less than 10 seconds?" And the creative guys says yes and starts to go into an explanation about catching the user's eye or some BS and the older gentleman puts up his hands and leans over to the guy to the right of him and asks, "Did w
    via u/ill_mango
  • 15
    Font - Everyone in the room fell silent for a second as we tried to process what he was saying...meanwhile he continues "Because if we paid for a 15 second spot, why should we only use 10 seconds?" Since our company did all sorts of TV work as well, one of the creative guys picked up on it and basically explained that banners don't work like TV - the client literally thought that everyone coming to the web page would stop for 15-30 seconds and watch the banner.
    via u/ill_mango
  • 16
    Font - + [deleted] I'm editing a commercial for a charity concert right now and my client told me he had video to work with, he sent me youtube clips. 240p youtube clips.
    via u/deleted
  • 17
    Font - Slapguts About three years ago, I had a job at a small print shop as their "graphic designer". Desktop publishing mostly, occasional business card, mostly just lame forms and such. We got a job for a towing company. They were AAA All American Towing, or something similar. Something with a lot of As so they'd be listed first in the phone book. They wanted us to whip up something over-the- top patriotic, American flags, bald eagles, all of it. I do a quick little mock up, and send it off to
    via u/Slapguts
  • 18
    Font - They love it, every single part of it, except the bald eagle stock photo I used. They said the eagle looked angry, and not friendly at all. My manager and I make a couple jokes, mostly about it being a bird of prey, not a bird of play, etc. In a minute of downtime, I opened the project up, and spent some time screwing around with the Liquify tool. Basically made it look like the eagle was grinning. It was ridiculous. Sent it over to the manager, we had a couple laughs.
    via u/Slapguts
  • 19
    Font - About a week later, I get the revised proof back from the customer. Somehow, we had sent them my joke happy eagle. They love it. Run it. Business cards for everyone in the company, envelopes, letterhead, invoice sheets, and vehicle wraps for the trucks. Saw the trucks all over town for months, and laughed my as off every time.
    via u/Slapguts
  • 20
    Font - KarateBillP I have posted this before and people found it quite funny: I was once hired as a web designer at a company that sells machine parts. I was supposed to create and maintain their web page for them. On my first day at the office I was seated at my desk... which had no computer on it. I was told that I was to draw the website on paper and after it was approved I would get a computer.
    via u/KarateBillP
  • 21
    Font - floorface I once had a client tell me to rewrite my report without using the word "this." He said it was too vague. Just as an experiment, I want all of you to push "ctrl+f" and search for "this." Just look at all of the instances of the word "this" on your current page, and try to come up with an alternative word or phrase. I dare you. If ing dare you.
    via u/floorface
  • 22
    Font - [deleted] I used to work in the appliance department of Sears. We had a woman call in who had recently purchased a stove. The stove was having issues and she wanted us to send someone out, it seems this particular stove was possessed. We offered to send a repair man out, we even offered to have our delivery team bring her another stove. Nope, not good enough. She wanted us to send out a priest who could preform an exercism... On a stove.
    via u/deleted
  • 23
    Font - therxbandit Was hired free lance to do color correction for a guy who shot everything on a DSLR, but every shot was white balanced incorrectly and the differences between certain images were literally night and day. The difference between a white wall being green and orange. I told him my rate, and he agreed to it. I worked for 2 hours on the first cut, to which he replied that he was not satisfied. He wanted it to "pop" more. He wanted more saturation out of his images (something I had t
    via u/herxbandit
  • 24
    Font - So I went back through and spent another 3 hours tweaking things until everything popped a bit more, but obviously the shots could appear completely alike anymore. When I sent him the 2nd cut, he emailed me back telling me that he had already decided to go with a cut that he made previous to contacting me. He then said he still wanted to pay me for my work (to which I wanted to say, "Well fyeah, you better".)
    via u/herxbandit
  • 25
    Font - I told him even though I'd worked 5 hours on it, I'd only charge him for 4 since he wasn't using the final product. He didn't email me for a week. I emailed him again. He wrote back saying "I can't believe you're going to charge me that much for an outcome that we're not even using and looks worse than the original."
    via u/herxbandit
  • 26
    Font - platinumgulls As a web developer I feel your pain. I experience the same thing almost daily. Here's my best story. We had a huge law firm on the east coast. They had a piddly little site and were the hardest people to keep happy. Well, they finally decided to redesign their site. The whole process was like giving birth, but we finally get to the finish line and they tell us they want to release the site at 3am so when their clients go the site, they get a big surprise.
    via u/platinumgulls
  • 27
    Font - We tell them repeatedly we don't have the staff to do a cut over at 3am, the latest anyone will stay is 6pm and if something goes wrong, we have no support for it and nothing will happen until the following morning. No dice, they say go ahead and release it at 3am. Guess what happened? The site bonked, and their site wasn't up until 11am the next morning (just like we told them). After a ton of heated emails, the CEO and CIO getting involved and lots of conference calls about credits and
    via u/platinumgulls
  • 28
    Font - TL;DR: big law firm in NY had us re-do their website. they wanted it released at 3am, we warned them about not having support but they still went ahead and did Ianyways. Site crashed and we dumped them as a client the following month.
    via u/platinumgulls
  • 29
    Font - BaconCat Once worked with a division in IT that bragged about having all their paper forms "Fully electronic". I asked them for details, and they described how rather than print off the form and mail it in, people could now print it off, fax it, that fax would be converted to a PDF and then emailed to the division, whereupon they would print it off and file it in a filing cabinet.
    via u/BaconCat
  • 30
    Font - playboss I work in FX which trades 24hrs since its over the counter and not exchange-based. Got a call from a European client at 3am CST that went something like this: Client: Hello I need you to call these guys in the states right away for me. They are one of our clients. Me: This seems like a call you should be making as we have no interaction with these people... Client: I can't call them now, its 4am NY time right now! YOU need to call them!
    via u/playboss
  • 31
    Font - Me: And if I call them, what time do you think it will be when they answer? Client: What are you saying?! Me: Whether the call comes from Europe or the States, its still 4am NY Client: (pause) Oh, okay. We will deal with this NY AM then. Bye
    via u/playboss
  • 32
    Font - arandomJohn Doing consulting work at a major nation wide fitness chain. They want to do fingerprint recognition to gain access to the gyms. We do some modeling and explain that given their customer base, their desired false positive and false negative rates and current limits of the technology we'd have to have customers enter a 4 digit number on a keypad in order to make the system work. The 4 digit number would basically shrink the search space by a factor of 10,000 and make false posit
    via u/arandomJohn
  • 33
    Font - When asked why I explain the Birthday Problem (or Paradox) and how the network effects of doing many comparisons shape the statistics. All of this in front of the CTO. Then one of their tech people starts laughing out loud at me and asks where heard all this nonsense that I was making up. I calmly replied that while I have a CS degree from Stanford I first learned about the birthday problem in 5th grade.
    via u/arandomJohn
  • 34
    Font - That sent them over the edge and soon all the gym people were laughing including the CTO. I whipped up a spreadsheet on the spot with visualizations of the issue and they still didn't believe me. Next time I show up they have another consulting company there besides us. This new company claims to be able to solve the problem without having customers enter any sort number and that they can have hundreds of millions of fingerprint templates in the system without collisions, false positives,
    via u/arandomJohn
  • 35
    Font - I ask how they do that and some questions about the birthday problem. They answer some nonsense about multi-dimensional vectors and say that they've never heard of the birthday problem and then refuse to answer any more questions I have. We are never invited back to work on the project.
    via u/arandomJohn
  • 36
    Font - Fast forward about six years. I am a member of the gym and show up one day to find fingerprint scanners at the front desk. They ask me to select a 10 digit number that I have to enter before getting my fingerprint scanned. It was almost enough to make me buy a plane ticket to Carlsbad and scream, "We told you we could have done it with 4 digits!" at the top of my lungs.
    via u/arandomJohn
  • 37
    Font - fauxnetikz I work at a sign shop. One time we had a customer order some vehicle magnetics - no big deal we make them all the time. After he came to pick them up, we watched him go out to his car and try to put them on....the driver's window. He kept placing it on the window and acting surprised when it slid down and fell off. He even tried smoothing it down. Fing magnetics. How do they work?
    via u/fauxnetikz
  • 38
    Font - [deleted] My dad works as a programmer in a company run by him and his partner. I one time asked him about the weirdest site he ever was asked to build. This is what happened: Dad: "Well these two ladies had asked us to make an astrology site. Basically, you would enter your date of birth and it would give you a horoscope. You know, crazy s like that." Me: "So how did that work out?"
    via u/deleted
  • 39
    Font - Dad: "Oh it was pretty ng stupid. The clients had us delay the date of the launch." Me: "Really? Why?" Dad: "I s you not, they literally said 'The stars weren't aligned' for that date." The funny part is that the site went under a couple months after my dad was done with it.
    via u/deleted

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