out of the weeds

After three weeks of sheer mayhem, I think I've made it through.

I delivered my files to the client about an hour ago, and so far, I have not received a single frantic phone call, not one irritated voice mail, not a single congratulatory email, nothing. Not even a thank you.

As much as it doesn't sound like it, that's usually a good sign. Clients never thank you. Especially not when you put in Herculean effort to get their project done in time, even though they screwed it up in the first place and they seem to be doing everything humanly possible to prevent you from actually finishing it, while complaining the entire time that you're not going fast enough.

Sometimes no communication from the client is a bad sign. Like the calm before the storm. Right now, they're all huddled around a computer screen, awash in its glow, scrutinizing, meeting, making lists, poking over each and every feature, looking for the one mistake or oversight that I made. Even though, it's not possible to not make a single error in the timeframe that you asked for. Something has to give, and it's usually exactitude.

I had this great boss once who actually understood this. He loved to tell people about it too. Over and over again, he would, with a big flourish, take out his yellow legal pad and flip it to a clean page, "Every client wants it all", he would say as he drew an big equilateral triangle on the page with his impossibly twisted and chewed pen. Then he would say, "they want it cheap", and he writes CHEAP at one of the triangle points. "They want it right", and he writes RIGHT at another point, "and they want it fast", FAST goes down at the last point. "But I tell them, here you go", he pushes the pad towards me as if I were the client, "choose any two, you can't have all three", as he circles, CHEAP and FAST, as if circling it was somehow really driving the point home.

I have no idea what his diagram meant, but he is totally correct. Fast, cheap, or right, you can have two, but you will never achieve the third. Never. On all the projects I have ever worked on, never once has this been disproved.

I have many theories as to why clients try so hard to find the mistakes their consultants make. One theory is that clients think consultants are lazy slugs who couldn't make it in their world, so we skulked away in disgrace to become consultants. These guys are dangerous, they are the ones who prevent you from getting repeat business.

Another theory is that the client has never seen anything happen so fast in their careers, and they think I must have cut some corner or other somewhere to get it done. Usually, we accomplish in weeks what the client will take months or even years to accomplish. I do this on a daily basis. I am not super-human. I can do this because I do not have 3 meetings a day, I do not have to write memo after memo, I do not have to succumb to design reviews, endless sales calls from vendors, company meetings, training and benefits, mass emails from the CEO, annoying coworkers who hold you hostage in your cubicle telling you about their theory on lawn care, and on and on. I can accomplish more in a week than any of my corporate peers because I am not inundated with endless distraction. These clients don't really get this, and just assume you have somehow cheated.

Either way, I am done, I am tired and I need some fucking sleep.

Update: I hadn't heard from my client at all. So today (Monday) I called my main contact over there just to see how things went. Seems like everything went perfectly. There were no problems, and everything is proceeding smoothly. In fact, he said he was very impressed with my work, and we will definitely be getting work in the future. Wow. After that, I feel like maybe I should take back some of the stuff I said earlier, but, hey, I was grouchy...