The Interview: Bookbag Talks To The Anonymous Editor

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The Interview: Bookbag Talks To The Anonymous Editor

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Summary: Clients From Hell offers a hilarious collection of user-submitted stories from designers dealing with rude, clueless and demanding clients. We were delighted to interview its Anonymous Editor.
Date: 4 May 2011
Interviewer: Keith Dudhnath
Reviewed by Keith Dudhnath

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Clients From Hell offers a hilarious collection of user-submitted stories from designers dealing with rude, clueless and demanding clients. We were delighted to interview its Anonymous Editor.

  • Bookbag: When you close your eyes and imagine your readers, who do you see?

The Anonymous Editor: Great question. When I picture our readers, they're a lot like how I look when I catch a glimpse of myself reflected off my blank computer screen - hunched forward, maybe bespectacled, maybe in Wayfarers (!), giggling about the ineptitude of others. I remember a post coming across our feed a few weeks ago that said Designers are just assholes with wayfarers. ...But for some reason I've always thought that the site gets more female viewers. Freudian bid for female validation?

  • BB: Which Client From Hell first made you scream with fury?

TAE: By this, I assume you mean which post, rather than which actual client? Nothing yet. It's hard to ridicule something properly while being furious at it. We get a lot of submissions that are there more to grieve and vent than to provide anything funny, and that's fine. But the site is a humour site, and so its aim is ridiculousness, not scorn.

  • BB: Can Clients From Hell still frustrate you, or does the quest to catalogue them negate their worst traits to you?

TAE: I think seeing all of these people in one place, the sum of all the stuff they just don't know, their bullheadedness and backdoor racism, makes them actually less frustrating - probably because I feel, reading it and cataloguing it, that I'm not like that. And that's a good feeling. It's almost like a support group.

  • BB: What was involved in adapting the website to the book?

TAE: We had been approached by a few publishers but none of them really had much to offer. We were tossing around the idea of publishing on our own but ended up settling with New York based Channel V Media.

We designed the book and provided the content and they got it into stores, created a Kindle version and helped us release it.

The thing that struck us the most about the process of compilation was just the sheer variety. You sometimes lose perspective just by reading daily updates on the blog, but when we compiled it all we were just shocked at the amount of different types of unreasonable and ridiculous that clients can be.

  • BB: Was there a concern about going from a free website to a paid book?

TAE: Nah. The initial impulse was to keep the price of the book quite low. We wanted a coffee table book that you could pick up and put down whenever you wanted - we wanted it to be nicely designed, but we ultimately knew that this was a collection of pithy comments and it didn't need to be crazily produced.

  • BB: What sort of Clients From Hell would you intentionally leave off the website or out of the book?

TAE: The really cantankerous ones. The ones that you look at and immediately feel an ethical obligation to toss in the trash. The ones that shouldn't be allowed to have voice in a public forum, even if for ridicule. You might know the type.

  • BB: Are there any that you regret not including?

TAE: The really cantankerous ones. The ones that you look at and immediately... haha.

  • BB: What are your three favourite funny websites?

TAE: Cracked, Something Awful, and Norm MacDonald's Twitter (does that count?)

  • BB: It does! What were your three favourite books as a child?

TAE: Scheherazade's Arabian Nights, Roald Dahl's BFG, and Pecos Bill - any version.

  • BB: What are you reading at the moment, and how are you finding it?

MO: I'm currently reading Roberto Balano's 2666, a birthday present from a friend - it's very very good. And a stack of back issues of Harper's magazines that my friend gave to me. Also, a great deal of poetry. Too much to name.

  • BB: What's next from the Clients From Hell team?

TAE: A documentary. (I dunno).

  • BB: Thanks a lot for the interview. We can't wait to read about the latest ridiculous clients!

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