Crazy Clients from the Commonwealth

I have this unfortunate theory: people who come from islands are stark raving mad. Martha's Vineyard is home to the Kennedys. People in PEI used to spread dead crabs on their potato crops as fertilizer. The Japanese have toilet seats that play music so they can't hear themselves pee. And the British: what about the British? Uniformly, they're a nation of whack-jobs. Don't get me wrong: I love the British Commonwealth. I'm 3/4 British. I think it's a great concept, just the people at the core of it are mad.

These people were simutaneously rude and polite. They'd welch on a $5 bill, but make you seem cheap and unworthy. Here are three clients* tied together by the fact they come from different parts of the British Commonwealth:

David Figgit. David was this little twitchy guy. Always on the move. Our running joke is that he'd walk up to you and say, "Welcome.Welcome.We have a lovely ham fry-up for breakfast.Can I get you coffees?Oh,must go.My hair is on fire again.Ta-ta." I liked David but I was part of a small set. People had two theories on him: theory A: he was gay; or theory B: he was a letch.
Theory A: he loved dress-up. He had a whole host of iffeminite traits. His apartment doubled as the office for his business. One time, he tried to encourage me to come into the meeting while he was showering. ew.
Theory B: He would hire waitresses based on their Russ-Meyer-viability score and then proceed to put them in compromising position. "David! You pants are unzipped!" "What, oh my, that's my willie, isn't me. Oh dear me."
He dumped my company because he went to a tourism seminar held by a US consultant (with maybe what 2,000 web developers in town, they had to go out of the country for help?) . That consultant suggested that he host his stuff in the US. Fancy that.

Arthur Manyteeth. Arthur was a friend of a friend. He had this wonderful British talent of being horribly polite and horribly rude at the same time. In the nicest way, he would say, "My, this is rubbish that I won't allow my terrier to shit upon." He wanted everything for $10: hosting, web development, SEO, you name it. I can understand you're cash strapped but you sell high-end merchandise for $50K a pop and you sell a lot of them. He dumped me because I billed him for hosting. When we didn't pay after three months, I suspended his site. He was so insensed that I would cancel his service, that he went elsewhere.

Edith Hoofmark-Inhead. This women ran a horse-stable with the Barbara-Woodhouse "Beat those darling beasts with a stout switch" manual of style. Her stables were in the boonies. I would schedule meetings, journey into the hinterland to see her and she'd be busy. She promised riding lessons in exchange for our services. She kept dragging us out into nowhere to be rebuffed at the last minute. This was before we realized that a client worth $0 deserves zero effort. We intended on sending out the fattest and most punishing person available. Before we could use it, the gift certificate we were given expired. A year later, when we asked for payment for the hosting, she refused. We were busy and never got around to deleting her site, we just got rid of the HTML (images ended up in this stupid shared folder for all of our clients). She later got another designer to redesign the site, but hook into our images on our server. I asked that they stop linking. They ignored that email. I explained how that was wrong by swapping out an innocuous photo of a woman on a horse for one of a man pleasuring himself with a horse shaped dildo. They stopped using our image directories and used their own.

* names have been changed, because the made up names are funnier.