Stupid Is As Clients Does

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So last week I talked about stupid interviews, and I was going to segue into stupid bosses this week but I had a situation come up with a client about a week ago and I just had to share. I'm a technical writers for a software company at my day job, and I wrote a set of custom documents for one of our clients. The product that the documents were for is one that produces pdf printouts with barcodes that you fax along with backup and the system automatically files it for you in a digital storage system. Very cool if you do a lot of paperwork (especially government). Since we had no way of knowing whether printers would be available in every classroom, I printed out the pdf scanning documents and merged them into my training guide so that they could see an example and the instructor could explain how to organize the pdf copies along with their original documents before scanning.

So I get an email from the training manager wanting to know if I have the original pdf's used for my training guide because the clients would like to have the digital file. I said I did but I was not in the office that day, could they wait until Monday. He thought so and I figured we were done. A little while later he emails again. This is what he said (paraphrased):

You are going to get a laugh out of this one. I got an email from one of their managers saying that they were going to have an employee scan the pdf files and attach them to an email to send to me so that I knew exactly which documents they wanted.

I emailed back and asked "At that point, what would I be sending back?"

I almost fell off my chair laughing. So the client wants a digital copy and they're going to SCAN the document (thus making a digital copy) to tell us which digital copy to send them. Wow! So far that is the Stupid Comment of the Year. Might take a lot to best that one.

So any of you work with clients/the public? Got a stupid story to share?

Deadly DeLeon