I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

Next call: um why is the mouse cursor moving on it’s own

Dumb as shit and apparently an asshole too (screaming at you on the phone).
What a lovely combination.

I’m not sure if he’ll get much use out of your software lol. Are you sure he’s smart enough to use a computer?

@molaram that sucks, but take comfort in the fact that he will likely be laughed out of court. After two years, he's going to have a fuck of a time explaining why he hadn't noticed anything amiss until now

@AtuM this guy also got a bit threaten-y with us, we did have lots of corroborating evidence in the form of 'angry emails demanding the very things he was now complaining about' so just called his bluff. I guess it could get messy if it did get as far as court, but after two years' paying for product development, it's got to be hard to claim sudden ignorance of its direction

@AtuM Ah this was years ago, long since dumped that one. Good money but they didn't have a clue what they were doing, after a while it just felt like I was taking it in bad faith.

@AtuM I was tagged in it, but fair enough. I second your wishes to @molaram. A client who is angry because their site *doesn't* look shit, that's got to be an interesting battle.

Best story I’ve heared in a few weeks lol.

I had something in a similar vein once: I sent over a demo of a showreel video I'd created for a client, which they opened in VLC player. The file had some programmatic temporary name like "013744_demo.mp4", which VLC shows by default in the bottom right hand corner of the screen for the first 5 seconds or so before fading out.

Next thing I know I've got the retarded client angrily complaining about some "jargon" that I'd obviously "forgotten" to remove being displayed over the video, which was "very unprofessional".

One thing I've learned over the decade or so I've been self employed is that it simply isn't worth taking on clients below a minimum threshold level of computer literacy because these retarded imbeciles will quickly become a black hole for your time; namely because you end up providing a free, unpaid, and utterly thankless IT coaching service on top whatever work you've actually been contracted to do.

LOL