I am not your fucking teacher

I know a lot of you take Paul Graham seriously and he had said, for a startup every customer is valuable. No, I am not going to spend the next forty give minutes trying to find that advice. You can either take my word or fuck off.

Thirty minutes into John's house and I've got two thoughts in:

1. Jump off the second floor window, or

2. Look the old man in the eye and simply tell him to give me some fucking space.
   

It's been a little over six months since I went freelance and it has been a great fucking ride. I can talk about the woman who called 1am in the morning asking me to play tennis with her next day, the guy who called me 15 times cuz I refused to work on his computer, or the guy who's been inviting me to his house for dinner in exchange of my service. In these last six months or so, I've ditched four regular customers. That meant regular streams of cash for one phone call. I did make one exception to that, and I will come to that at the end.

For the sake of time, let us simply get on with John here. Ten minutes into his residence/business and he's telling me about the old tech, Shawn.

'Shawn was too BRILLIANT for them and he would just fix things & leave'.

I examine Shawn's work, and so far the guy has done a pretty good job. But John here, wants me to not only fix things, he wants to be in control while I show, tell & explain to him how things work.

Well, I am sorry mister. But I am a tech/geek/nerd, whatever pleases your appetite. You see, I don't work that way. In fact, I ask very detail questions even before taking on any assignment. Not because I am scared, but that way I know what to expect. I tell my clients to make a list. I go through the list, demonstrate my work at the end and ask for any changes. What's that? You didn't get it??!! Here it is in three simple steps:

1. Give me a list of the things that needs to be done,

2. At the end, I will demonstrate the solutions to each problems on the list,

3. If you want any change, for your convenient ass, I will make that change and demonstrate again.
   

I guess not good enough for John. He is INFURIATED ( in his own word) after I setup his photo printer on the network without showing him or better fucking yet, having him do it himself. I am really sorry, but if you are trying to learn how things work so that way you don't have to call on me next time. You can either google crap yourself or just take a freaking class at your local university. In this instance, it would be a class on networking,Windows 20000 would come in handy too. You get the picture here, I hope. If not, shit.

But instead of jumping off the window, I got out of there. I was suppose to be there for at least six hour, but after three hour, I just couldn't handle it anymore. Of course, I made sure to put things in order, organized, self-explanatory; not for John but for the next unfortunate tech. They kept insisting on me coming back, I simply don't fucking think so. I didn't even pay attention to if they got my name right on the check. I simply wanted out of that place.

Now let's talk about the exception I have made. The only exception I made is an art advisor. Why?

Because she will let me do my things while watching over my shoulder. She won't ask any question while I am fixing an issue on hand. She just wants me to show her what she needs to do to make things work properly and she will take extensive notes. Let me demonstrate with an example:

The art advisor, we will call her Sue, wants all her data backed up to her external drive. I can set up the program Sue bought to perform incremental backup every night automatically. Sue, on the other hand would rather backup data manually, herself. This is where Sue, will give me the time to setup the program while watching over my shoulder and not ask any questions or bother. Let me murmur/talk to myself. At the end, Sue just wants me to show how she can do the manual backup. In this instance, I take great pleasure in explaining how things work and walk her through each step giving her the time to take notes.

So, what is my philosophy here?! Well, life is too short my friend and not every customer/client is fucking worth it.