Dealing With Those "Difficult" Clients

We've all had them. The client from.. well, you know where. The one person whose name alone can strike fear into your heart. When they call we groan, stare at the phone and wonder what excuse we could possibly come up with to not talk to them. Is severe nausea good enough? While we're not to happy about dealing with these people, they are our clients after all. They're the ones ultimately paying our bills and we have to find some way of dealing with them. Now mind you these clients might not all be be abusive or unkind, they might just be the kind that "don't get it" and probably never will.. the kind that think putting those nifty wav files that autostart and loop continuously on their site is a "cool", or that "scrolling is a bad idea", or even the ones that think blue and brown and green make a nice gradient background colors. I found this blog post by Rob Swan a while back that points out that there may be lessons we stand to learn from these difficult clients. It's a good read and when coupled with some anger management therapy and a bottle of pepto-bismol, it just might get you through that next phone conference.