Many moons ago, a colleague and I were discussing the potential of creating a special questionnaire for new clients. It would help us establish if a client was too stupid to work with us.

It occurs to me, now that I'm running my own business, that this is a very good idea. For example, here are 10 reasons why you might be too stupid to be my client:

• three days before I run your focus groups you ask me --with venues, equipment, materials and participants all organised and approved--if you can change the entire focus of those groups.


• you insist on me recruiting your friend for a focus group because he's from the 'target audience' only he turns out to be deeply anti-social and not be part of the target market at all.


• on the afternoon of a focus group you ask me if you can change the already approved and printed materials I am going to use.


• you think that I can run eight individual testing sessions in the same amount of time I quoted to run two hour focus groups each with 8 people (no, that does NOT count as half as many people) and on the same budget.


• you submit a quote to me two days after the deadline I indicated clearly to you in mail and over the phone.


• you tell me you need me to begin working immediately, then inform me I must wait until a service agreement goes through, which will take about five weeks.


• when the service agreement comes through several weeks later and I'm already working on another project, you throw a tantrum because I'm not immediately available.


• you ask me to review your site design and then neglect to give me the latest version of it to look at.


• you tell me that you don't like any of my web site designs and, when asked which web sites you do think are well designed, tell me that you don't use the internet.


• you short-pay my invoice by exactly the amount of sales tax you are supposed to pay.

Some people are too stupid to live.

Monkey Business

8 down. 112 to go.

That's a whole lotta monkeys. Go me!

What's all this monkey business about then?