Client from Hell.

Work hasn't been going well lately.

There is this really difficult customer that my boss who has been really challenging to work with, and I have expressed how uncomfortable I am to be working with this guy because he is just a very unplesant individual.

Let's call this customer Justin.

Justin is a single 60 year old guy who was referred to us by a previous customer, upon the first meeting back in March, I already knew he was going to be difficult, he had a lot of expectations and some of them were not realistic, when my boss tried to manage his them by offering some disclaimer, for example, expecting tiles to be 100% align and the grout line to be perfectly filled, which I will have to say are standards that we will of course try to achieve as much as possible, but because laying of tiles is ultimately still done by human hands, there will be some minor imperfections here and there, Justin was not having any of it and told us his expectations are very high and that we should be aware of it and esentially deliver that standard that he is expecting. 

It was a major red flag because of how stubborn he was about it, so I wasn't keen to work with him and I had told my boss how much I didn't like Justin, my boss agreed that he was difficult to talk to and I had assumed we were on the same page and we won't entertain Justin anymore, my plan was to offer him a simple space planning proposal and we would prepare a quotation for him, just as a gesture of goodwill seeing how he had come down to our office to meet us.

Fast forward a few weeks, no news from Justin, I thought he was gone, but for some reason, my boss decided to reach out to Justin and ask him if he had any feedback, and suddenly Justin was back in our lives again. We had a second meeting and it was really not going anywhere, my ideas were presented but he wasn't very keen on it, and we went thorugh that whole "expectation" and how he has very "high standards" chat again, it was exhausting and this meeting just reinforced my disdain towards the idea of working with him as a client.

Weeks go by and my boss decided to reach out to Justin again to check for any updates. Justin replies, but because he was going to be travelling, we didn't have a third meeting  but Justin would ask some questions and at that point, I just could not be fucked and left my boss to do the replying. After a while, the chatgroup just went dead, and it stayed dead for weeks, so all of us just assumed Justin is no longer interested and we all just moved on.

Well, Justin came back 2 weeks ago and now my life suddenly feels like shit again.

He was texting in the groupchat asking about a bunch of new things, scruntizinig the last quotation we send over and the way he was texting was very unplesant and extremely entitled, there was this passive aggressiveness behind every message that just pisses you off. 

I express to my boss once again how we should drop Justin and not entertain him because I didn't want to work with him as I felt like the project is just not worth the mental pain and torture this guy is putting us through , plus I also wanted Justin to be able to go find another ID quickly and for us to not waste his time. 

But my boss kept replying back and apparently he had a call with Justin last week where the both of them were esseitally shouting at one another on the phone, at least that was what my boss told me.

Upon hearing how unpleasant that call had been, one would then think that the toxicity of this client and just the way the call went, it is a pretty clear sign that the renovation will not be smooth at all, and we should drop it before it gets to that stage.


This early design stage is SUPPOSED to be the fun part, it's where the client and the designer / contractor exchange ideas and work together to come up with the final design, the painful part only starts when the renovation begins, but with Justin, we are already experiecing that level of difficulty at such an early stage.

So what does my boss decide to do?

Set up a Zoom call for me to be present so we can run through my proposal together. 

Fucking Hell.

This meeting happened yesterday and it was probably one of the most unpleasnt design meeting I had to sit through, it was 2.5 hours long of Justin just extremely condescending, questioning every single advice we were offering him, I was literally shouting over the mic at him at the start because he kept debating my design choices, then when I realize how pointless the whole conversation was, I just switched off mentally and let my boss handle the rest, my boss was ALSO shouting in the mic because of how upsetting the covnersation was going and by the end of the meeting, I was just done.

I looked at my boss when I ended the call and asked him rhetorically...

"This type of customer you still want to take?"

... never have I had a design meeting where we were spending more than half the time debating with the client in such an aggressive manner, like the entire meeting is 

And my boss's response.

"I think we are making progress."

what.

the.

actual.

fuck.

...like what the actual fuck, I couldn't believe THAT was the fucking conclusion he came to. We literally sat in silence for like a minute because I just couldn't believe my boss still thinks this project is not going to become a complete shit show.

His judgement is completely messed up, why in the FUCK would you choose to work with someone who is going to be a complete fucking nightmare, we are only at the early stages of design discussion and I am already shouting at the client over a zoom call, and my boss thinks "we are making progress".

For the longest time, I have been planning to find a new job, but this current job has always been so comfortable  (despite the shitty pay) that I just never really found the need to actively quit, but the way my boss is willing to put the team through this abusive collaboration with such a toxic customer has shown me just how fucked up his sense of judgement is and if there is a second Justin that appears in the future, I would rather not be here to deal with that shit anymore, I am not getting paid enough to deal with this shit.