Exercised

I'm increasingly concerned by the competence of one of my clients. I've written about this before but I'm beginning to despair.

This morning, I received an email asking to write a news round-up for every issue, on top of the feature I will supply. So far so good - more work, more money. I fired off an email by return asking what sort of stuff I should cover and how much copy to supply - this latter is not rocket science; publications usually commission by word count. I got back a convoluted response about columns per page, modules per column and character count per module...

In the end, I picked up the phone in the hope of getting clarification. The editor said I'd get a better idea when I saw the paper (copy allegedly in the post) and then admitted it was all new to them...

I suggested supplying 1,000-1,500 words for the new column instead, thinking that would be ample for what they had in mind. My mind is boggling at just how this company is managing to produce its publication. I'm not suggesting they are incompetent but there is clearly a steep learning curve involved here.

Elsewhere, a quick chat with my lovely graphic designer suggests that the pair of us are about to be dropped by one of our joint long-standing commercial clients due to a regime change. No great surprise. We sort of suspected this might happen. It's not uncommon - person leaves, replacement brings in their own people. On the other hand, wherever the person leaving ends up may result in more work for us with their new company. And it's not as if I am short of work. I have more than enough on my plate right now.

I have a bad headache today, m behind on my workload as a result and desperately need zeds...