The Only Thing That Changes Is The Scenery

The consulting company I’m doing some jobs for sent me a real basketcase of a client this week. She just wanted some really simple changes done to her database structure, so it didn’t take me long to finish it. Although “not too long” is “far too long” in bitchese, so I had to deal with fun expletives and such because the project was a couple of hours behind schedule. After that, she seemed satisfied. However, on New Years she begins screaming because she’s having some sort of problem publishing with her WYSIWYG program. So she’s on the phone with the guy who got me the work, and he’s listening to her bitch and moan about how if we can’t get this small job done right, how are we supposed to handle bigger clients. She doesn’t quite get the fact that HomeSite is software that we didn’t write, nor do we have to support. When her husband (a bigwig at a software company, who’s recurring business we would really enjoy) gets on the phone to hear our side of the tale, his wife is still screaming in the background. Here is the word-for-word dialogue that ensued:

The Husband: “HONEY. I’m trying to talk to the man, and I can’t do that with you yelling into my ear about things you don’t understand!”
Consultant: “Listen, we’ll help you out on this one no problem, which is exactly what I told her. Don’t take offense by me saying so, but your wife is a little wound up.”
The Husband: *whispers* “You don’t have to tell me pal, I married the bitch.”

Classic. Just classic. The best bit is that the woman was apparently trying to change records in the database via her WYSIWYG program. I tried explaining the difference between publishing a static HTML page and modifying a database record, but that lasted all of five incredibly inane minutes. Instead, I had her assistant get on the phone, who seemed to understand that changing the record via the handy-dandy web interface was a much more intelligent approach. I think I’ll change her to my primary contact over there from now on. I wonder if she can sign off on billing as well?