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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Copy & Paste Mentality

We all know that a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment is prone to illicit repro­duc­tions: songs, movies, stylesheets, markup, code, graph­ics, soft­ware etc. You name it. All your bits are belong to us! As such this is noth­ing new, I remem­ber the days when tapes were hot, hot, hot! But some­how there was at least some level of effort put into get­ting that wicked new album on tape – after which you shared it with your friends get­ting drunk while play­ing NHL or Road Rash on a Sega Gen­e­sis (yup, those were the days).

Presently shar­ing requires as much effort as switch­ing on your com­puter. Aside from the fact that shar­ing is inher­ent to a net­work, a wor­ri­some trend is tak­ing shape: copy and paste men­tal­ity is infect­ing all lay­ers of soci­ety, not only the com­puter lit­er­ate and hard­core geeks. In the great tra­di­tion of client sto­ries from hell, here’s my version.

While work­ing on a cor­po­rate web site I get a phone call from the client: “Umm, yes, we just had a meet­ing with our 3 CEO’s and would like to expand the site with a few extra sec­tions, is that pos­si­ble?” Ok, first of, what the f***? 3 CEO’s? Ugh, wel­come to feed­back and approval cycle from hell. Any­way, more busi­ness is always good, so I told them I’d send a revised offer and con­tract. No big­gie. Right?

Two days later I get another phone call: “Yeah, errmÂ… we had a look at your offer but found its price rather dis­turb­ing.” I get these types of answers most of the time, clients always think any price is ridicu­lous, what­ever the amount (tip: odds are a client will try to bar­gain, make sure you cal­cu­late some safety mar­gin; any­where between 15% and 20% will do). After get­ting the “this price is ridicu­lous” preach, I explain how I cal­cu­late my fees, the amount of work it will take and of course offer them a 15% rebate since they’re request­ing more busi­ness (safety mar­gin, remem­ber). But at that exact moment light­en­ing strikes: “Yes, yes, yes, that’s all fine, but isn’t a few extra pages just a mat­ter of copy and paste.”

Click, click, boom! Copy and paste mentalityÂ…

It’s dur­ing moments such as these that I hate clients more than I need them. As if mat­ters couldn’t get any worse, my sen­si­ble explaina­tions failed mis­er­ably to con­vince the client oth­er­wise: “Yeah, well, if you’re going to charge for these few extra sec­tions we’re afraid that we’ll be forced to take our busi­ness else­where.” Talk about extreme mea­sures. Worst of all, I already fin­ished all the com­po­si­tions and just got approval, from all 3 CEO’s, which is close to a miracle.

So I ask you? What would you have done? Give in, and fin­ish the project with­out billing for the other sec­tions and keep a client happy (and get the full ini­tial amount)? Or, refuse to do work for free and tell them to f*** them­selves, accom­pa­nied by the tra­di­tional mid­dle fin­ger. Yet bill for the hours already worked and risk los­ing a refer­ral and money?

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

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