Spent 8 hours on a "quick" edit that should've taken 30 minutes

Client asked me to "just tweak the margins" on a 200 page document, and between them not knowing what margins are and me having to redo half the formatting, it ate my whole Tuesday. Has anyone else had a tiny fix turn into a full day mess?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_john1d ago

Wait, did they at least PAY you for the full day? I had a client once who asked me to "just reorder a few chapters" in their ebook and by the time I was done I had to rebuild the entire table of contents and fix all the cross references. Little requests like that are NEVER as simple as they sound, it's like they think we have a magic "fix everything" button.

xenam8421h ago

A friend of mine once got asked to "quickly update the logo" on a client's website. She said sure, thinking it would take ten minutes. Turns out the old logo was embedded in like forty different page templates and the new one had a weird transparent background that broke on half of them. By the time she fixed all the formatting and made sure it looked right on mobile, it took her three hours. @the_john nailed it, clients genuinely seem to believe there's a button labeled "fix everything instantly" on our keyboards. She tried to explain the extra work and the client just said "but it's just a logo though." Like yeah, and a car is just four wheels but you wouldn't say that to a mechanic.

tessap9720h ago

but it's just a logo though" makes me see red every time I hear it. What worked for me was to start sending quick video walkthroughs showing the actual code and templates I'd have to touch, so they could see the mess themselves. Once they saw the thirty minutes of clicking through files, they usually got why a "simple swap" costs more than they thought.