Don’t Call Me On a Saturday Night (And Other Ways to Spot a Bad Client)

One Saturday evening in the early days of my freelance career, I checked my phone and saw I had three missed calls. It was 9pm at night. I was elbow deep in a family size bag of crisps watching Netflix.

Had something terrible happened?

Nope, it was just one of my clients trying to get hold of me On A Saturday Night. I shot them an email: “Is everything okay?”.

Without responding to the email, they tried calling again. I caved and answered. Of COURSE it wasn’t an emergency. They were just working late on their project and had some ideas they wanted to run past me On A Saturday Night.

The next Monday morning, I emailed them laying out my office hours: 8.30am-5pm, Monday to Friday.

Saturday night at 9pm was so far out of that timeframe it was laughable.

While the project I was working on was really exciting, my boundary-less client had absolutely ruined it for me. I no longer enjoyed the hours I spent working on it, and I dreaded picking up my phone in case I had texts, emails, and missed calls from them.

In the end, I had to leave the project because it all got too much.

This was a prime example of Not a Quality Client.