D, I just sent you an email that bounced back. You are over quota at your host. I realize this is an odd way to reach you, but I tried everything else I could think of.
You may be interested to know that since I don’t have your phone number, I went to your employer’s website to look for a work email. The About page features a photo and short job description of everyone who works there. Everyone, that is, but you.
Being a sucker for company photos, I wasted a good half hour studying the faces. As I did this, I started to feel bothered by something but didn’t know what. Then it struck me: everyone in the company appears to be the same age. Have you noticed this? It’s eerie. The only possible exception is Bill, the Director of Venue Partnerships, who in his photo is wearing a chicken head.
Could it be that Bill is wearing a chicken head to hide the fact that he isn’t the same age as everyone else?
On a related note, I recently attended a meeting that included a woman who looked like a mouse. She had a mouse nose and mouse chin and even little mouse eyes. For some reason I got the idea in my head that I was going to blurt this out at the meeting. The way I imagined it, someone would ask me a question about website accessibility, and then, instead of answering, I would turn to the woman and say, apropos of nothing, “You look just like a mouse, did you know that?” I really thought I was going to do this, but of course I didn’t. It was a great relief when the meeting ended.
17 May 2004 | Guitar
I once had a guitar that kept going out of tune. Two minutes after I tuned it, it would need to be tuned again. Finally I took it to an expert, a guy who built his own guitars, and he said the guitar was warped in such a way that it couldn’t be tuned at both ends. If you tuned it at the top, it would be out of tune at the bottom, and vice versa.
Most things, I’ve noticed recently, are shaped like that guitar.
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The last few weeks I’ve been working with a client on navigation for a large, complicated website. After much discussion and debate, we’ve arrived at what appears to be the correct set of top-level sections. The only problem is that some of the content doesn’t totally fit into any of these sections. Whenever we change the sections to accommodate this content—say, by adding new sections or by changing the names of existing sections—the set of top-level sections seems wrong.
Although this may sound like the guitar example above, my sense is that it’s a case of a missing breakthrough. There’s a solution out there that will address both ends of the problem, only we haven’t found it yet.
I’m not sure how I know this.
All my clients these days are good clients. Good clients are people who don’t change things fifty times and who you can tell during an important phone conversation that you need to go pee. Part of the reason my clients are so good these days is that I’ve stopped accepting work from bad clients.
Ah, but how do I know in advance which clients will be bad clients and which good? Answer: I can feel it.
It doesn’t take long for the feeling to sink in. Usually it happens during the first conversation, as I ask about goals and audience and resources.
I don’t ever tell the bad clients what’s going on (e.g., “I’d don’t want this job because you’re a controlling motherfucker who will end up making my life miserable”). That would be rude. Instead I offer some half-plausible excuse and pass them along to friends who can’t afford to be so picky.
It’s taken me years to get this point, and fuck does it feel good. The clincher came this morning when one of my clients (needless to say, a good one) sent me the following email:
I had a nightmare about the website last night. In my dream the website looked exactly like a brochure, although it was still a website. I was at the print run and they kept making mistakes, like printing the front page with our content, while the rest of it was an advertisement for a concert of electronic music. I had a fit and forced them to print it again. After it was printed the second time, I noticed that you had decided to totally change the theme to a cartoon “the Last Supper.” Also, the cuts were very sloppy, and when I went to go check out the cutting situation, it turned out that all the brochures were being cut one-by-one by a stripper with a paper cutter. Then I woke up.
