In case it’s not clear, that title is totally sarcastic. Do you ever notice how clients who really couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag somehow have a whole lot to say about your professional writing? I usually try to take it in stride, perhaps gently pointing out that I’ve got a decent command on the language and that’s precisely why they hired me.
The worst was when I did some writing for a client’s client. My client paid me, but her client didn’t pay her, saying “It was garbage and I had to rewrite the whole thing myself!” I was completely insulted, as you might imagine. First of all, the job had been so “urgent,” that I was literally working on it in the middle of the night. That said, the quality was still good, and I absolutely reject the notion that I have ever turned in an assignment that was “garbage.” Sure, she may not have liked it, but it certainly wasn’t complete rubbish. If it was, I wouldn’t have submitted it. (This is where I refrain from calling her off-color names.)
It seems, there are just some clients who will never be satisfied. It doesn’t matter if you do their urgent projects in the middle of the night and “meet” them on phone conferences for the first time at 11 p.m. the night before their big presentation (that they’ve now hired you to do) is due for submission. It doesn’t matter that you are a professional who knows how to use punctuation marks and a persuasive tone. In fact, it doesn’t even matter that you know what they hell you’re doing and they don’t. They’re just never going to admit that you’ve done better than they could have. Of course, they would have to actually do the work themselves to prove it, and that’s not going to happen, either.
Monty Python knows what I’m talking about: