what is with people?!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

I love what I do. I really do. I love working with new people to create a website that they are thrilled with. I love getting to know them and their products and I enjoy so much when the see the payoff in the form of increased sales and exposure. I love every aspect of it.

With the exception of just a few people, I'm still working with every single one of the folks I've done websites or work for. I take great delight in surprising them with how quickly I take care of the mundane requests and perform their updates. I guess I'm pretty simple at heart - things like a request coming in and my taking care of it 34 seconds later makes me giggle.

But then, every so often, something happens that just makes me stop and say, HUH?

That's what happened tonight. I had a job I was working on and I've just been fired because I wasn't "friendly enough". I wasn't "enough of a mother." I wasn't "warm and comforting" and the other person was having to do all the work.

This is bad enough to hear in any situation but this was told to me over the phone. It's Sunday and I took time out of my oh-so-brief family evening to call this gal because she was having some second thoughts about working with me. I don't know many other developers who would call someone on a Sunday night, way outside of business hours. Well, my hours are all over the place, but still.

But, when I saw that she had written and asked me to call, me being me, I set down to call her. And what I got was certainly not what I expected. I was utterly flabbergasted to hear the things she was saying and I think she had amped herself up to talk to me because I wasn't able to get a word in edgewise so we could try to work something out. Instead, I was treated to a rant about the things I wasn't doing that I should have been.

Apparently there was a game plan for this job and I wasn't issued a copy. It's a bit hard to know your place in a play when you've not been told your lines. I guess she had an expectation of what I would say and what I would do and when I didn't do this, she lost it. Too bad I wasn't told about this first! Might have changed the outcome.

I think I'll go finish making my scrumptious Cheesy Chicken Pot Pie. Yum!