I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

*Looks up from his computer and realizes that he has a self-imposed deadline to meet, but has been reading articles on "How to defeat procrastination" for the last hour.

That moment when a new client asks for help with their iPad and you ask them what model it is. "It's an Insignia brand iPad," they say proudly.

Let that sink in. It's a few layers.

Then they want you to set up 2 laptops, a TV and this unknown tablet so that they can talk to each other, with an as-on-tv fake diamond ring as payment.

Let that sink in.

If you want me, I'll be hiding under the couch.

Yanno, a popup that states "failure. No specific error was returned with this API call" is about as useful as "Error code: NOPE. Good luck fuckers!"

This occured after hitting the delete button for an MX record on a host that I'm migrating away from.

Working hard on a project. Suddenly, my system freezes except for my terminals. I curse, as I really don't want to reboot. I spend 10 minutes that I don't have investigating processes, and then look at my mouse.

It's wireless, and had simply run out of juice.

Calling any Python programmer here (especially package maintainers)

I run Gentoo, so am responsible for maintaining the dependency tree (to a degree). When it comes to Python I have 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 available. I'm always running into some package needing one version or another, and I can't just set a single version and forget it (which is fine. I'm running Gentoo).

I know that this is because python changes rapidly and so different libraries need different versions. Fine.

Why does this happen with Python and not C++, JavaScript, php, ruby, or any other languages on my system? I don't have 3 different versions installed to cover any other languages, and I don't spend time adding installation rules to cover them.

Why does Python need to be a pain in the ass about it?

Yanno, when I pay $60 for a theme, I get what I get. That's fine. Invariably I end up having to mess with the css. That's fine too.

However, theme makers? Please don't mix hyphens and underscores in your selectors. Decide on a case style. Avoid div-itus.

And for the love of all a selector such as #Top_bar .logo #logo a.logo makes code a pain in the ass to test

Arrgh. The web interface for DevRant sucks, so I post using my phone.

Why do I always notice the auto-correct generated mistakes after it's too late to fix them?

Why is there a time limit to edit my posts?

Client: I said I wanted that text to be white. We talked about this. You have to do what I tell you.

Me: the text is white. The color code is #ffffff.

Client: well make it more white!

*Sigh*

I provide hosting for my clients. About 3 months ago I discovered that the hosting company that I'd been using had been swallowed up by EIG, which explained why the tech support had gone downhill.

So, I jumped to another hosting company. Same shit different company!

Apparently the fact that my browsers sit at "connecting" for up to 30 seconds, and I get a "could not connect to" message half the time while I'm trying to fucking work on a deadline is the fault of some plug-in in a WordPress installation!

Oh yeah? Why then does this shit happen when I'm working on a pure html/css site?
Why then did it start happening after they "updated" my shared server?!

Oh, but the bastards suggest that I buy Cloudflare or pay for more space!

You fuckers made my work take 3 times as long, and you made an important migration fail!

Network places make mistakes. We all do. That's cool. Fucking own up to it, talk to me like a techie, and DON'T TRY TO BLAME IT ON ME OR MY TOOLS!

Fuck you! I think I'm gonna give Google Cloud a try, and do this shit myself!

Well, my client likes the sailboat picture that I put up on his site as the hero area.

Now he wants to know if I can animate the water and put the sounds of waves and seagulls in the background.

I can, but fuck you. I won't. I have respect for the people that visit your site.

Client: why do I have to use such a hard password for this website?

Me: For security reasons to protect your content and identity of your clients.

Client: Can't you just use the password that I'm used to? I use it on my banking software, and I've never been hacked so it should be good enough for you!

Me: what's the password that you want me to set up for you?

Client: you ready to take it down?

Me: go ahead.

Client: T ... U ... R ... D. You got that?

Me: ... Yes ...

*sigh*

Just for shame, moral support, then laughs, let's all we web developers first our first (or very early websites).

Here's mine. This was the first site that I ever built, entirely in vim. Html, css and a but if JavaScript.

Let me have it. How bad is this for a first site?

http://disabledautoalert.felinesoulsystems.com/...

The answer to every level 1 tech support call about internect connectivity:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Client: I put a signed copy of my contract on my website, like someone told me to do, so that people can click a button, download it and sign it. I'm having the problem of people changing the contract before they send it back to me. Can you fix that?

Me: Yes. Take your contact off of your website.

Client: ok, my next question is: can you make it so that I can use the phone and the internet at the same time? Someone told me that I couldn't. I have cable internet I think. (She was remembering dial-up)

Every topic began with "someone told me ..."

This client is going to be .... interesting.

Satan gives a death metal tutorial on bad HTML. (some curses so NSFW over speakers)
 https://youtube.com/watch/...

As a web developer with a client whom wants me to update their terrible page, i really needed this today.

I started writing basic in 1980 on my stepfather's Apple ][+. I was about ten. Then I got a Commodore 64 and got this awesome program called Gary's Game Kitchen. It had a Sprite editor and you programmed it by writing pseudo code. From there I learned C, then got jobs in Visual Basic and vb for Microsoft office (yuck!). Then I discovered Linux and became a web developer. *Hugs vim*

Client: I love the site and will sign your contract today. I'll even give you a bonus since you got it done early. Can you put it up there this evening?

Me: I'm so glad that you liked it. I'll bring a condom with me all filled out and ready to go so we can push it up there.

Me: Contract. Damned phone

Client: please leave the condom at home

What's your worst autocorrect with a client?

I use WordPress for my clients. No prob there. I hate it when I use someone else's paid theme and I have to beat my head against the CSS because they've used a lot of #id and !Important in the main css file.

Makes a child theme almost useless.

As a web designer/developer I hate this recent trend of very light gray text fields on forms that have a white background. I don't want to have to peer at my screen for objects. My vision is average, so why would a client want this?

I have a client who is refusing to pay the remainder of their bill. When we last spoke 6 months ago they told me that they were traveling, had no time or capital to give me the videos so that I could finish developing the site, and that they'd contact me when they were ready to continue. Now they're angry that I contacted them for their status and say that the onus was on *me* to call them sooner.

Who is the onus on to keep contact going if one party says "I'll call you"? The developer or the client?

For what it's worth, the site is done aside from integrating media that they were going to be sending me.

Waking up, feeling like I have a cold I sit down at my computer and see that my biggest client has asked for a minor change. I haven't had my coffee yet, but I can do what they're asking for in a minute. The site is *gone*. Just a permissions error. Have they been hacked?! Why hasn't the client called me?! The files are there and no changes have been made. It doesn't come up on any browser. 10 panicked minutes later I check it on my phone. It comes up. Wait a minute ... While editing /etc/hosts yesterday I'd accidentally uncommented a line for this site that I'd foolishly left in there. One character later my false alarm is solved. I'm getting my damned coffee now.

When a coworker promises a client that you will give them a free web page because he believes that you can create it in 5 minutes.