Anyone who works with clients, be they external or internal, is bound to have moments of frustration, when you think, "Did you really just say that?" Or, "Which meeting are you in? Because it's clearly not this one."
Over the past few years, I've had to learn new ways to
express (read: not express) frustration, as well as mind my mouth. (You
can take the girl out of Tower...) I can only walk around the building so many
times, and have yet to figure out how to do so during a meeting or a webex, so indulging
my innate snarkiness, is once again the chosen path. I give you the current
list of the top five annoying things my clients do:
5. Schedule meetings to talk about upcoming meetings.
Seriously. This happens far more often than you'd think possible.
4. Invite me to meetings I know nothing about for projects
I'm not involved with out of the blue. The usual culprit in this case is someone
forgetting to inform me that I have a new project.
3. Ask for constant status updates but consistently fail to get me approvals or information on time. Um...you know how this works. Right?
2. Ask me to move meetings to times they aren't available. The old "find time on my calendar" trick—psyche!
And the number one annoying client behavior is...contacting
multiple people in my department in an attempt to get the answer they want. If Mom
says, "no," go ask Dad. Yeah, this happens.
I do realize the above is pretty mild compared to what many
people deal with on a weekly basis, and humans are humans. Hang around each
other long enough and we'll likely get on each other's nerves at some point. I'm
very grateful to be employed, and that I had the good fortune to land at a
great agency led by a team that truly cares about the workforce. For the most
part, my clients are very easy to deal with, and we do good work together. It
might be more fun to be snarky, but I'm smart enough to realize how lucky I was to land this job. And that's winning no matter how I look at it.
