Vent About a Client

I rarely talk about work on this blog – I only occasionally rant. Here’s a rant for your reading pleasure.

Yesterday I got a random fax from a client stating, “Here are the edits to the presentation. Please incorporate in existing draft.”

I thought it funny I got this fax, considering I had not seen nor heard anything about a presentation that *I* would be working on for the client’s meeting on Monday afternoon. I don’t work for the client – I work for my boss, who works with the client. Normally the CLIENT creates his document, and our company sits in on the meeting and brokers the deal. We don’t do client documents.

So I have this fax, but no presentation. I make a few calls to the clients office, and find that the person that CREATED THE DOCUMENT is out sick and can’t EMAIL IT TO ME. huh? Why not give the edits to the person IN YOUR OWN OFFICE, especially since she CREATED it?

This morning, I’m emailed the document, and it’s atrocious. I have a really big problem with people who use Powerpoint but don’t use it correctly. It’s really quite an easy program, and yet most idiots don’t take the time to learn the basics in order to create presentations. So I was emailed a document that did NOT use the format function at all, but rather, all the text was typed and formatted by hand. So when I went to reformat the document in one fell swoop into my company’s format (much cleaner and nicer than the horrific formatting the client used), I still had to go through and REDO THE WHOLE THING BY HAND because they didn’t use the format templates that are readily available in Powerpoint. What should have taken 2 minutes took an hour. No kidding.

Not only that, but I only have the third and fourth section. Uh, hello? Where’s 1 and 2? And I got a random email with some Excel files – WHERE DO THEY GO? And I got a random fax this morning that is NOT PRESENTATION MATERIAL but says, “Include in presentation”. Uh – HOW?

I’m so frickin’ ticked off right now I can barely speak. Because I’m dealing with idiot clients but still have four other presentations to do for another boss. Yes, I said FOUR. The good news about those is I did them from scratch so they are 100% formatted correctly, at least. But it’s small consolation, really.