20 posts filed under Agency, newest first.
Three years of asking for the same performance work, getting agreed with in meetings, and never getting it scheduled. Then their new operations director asked whether the website had a carbon footprint and the identical list was approved in 2 weeks.
A ticket I wrote in 2022 asking for a few days to clean up the checkout templates has now outlived 2 project management tools, and in 3 years not one person has argued against doing it.
The developer who left in March had put four pages in the repo before they went, and the parts that saved me were not the parts I'd have guessed.
A proposal came back to me for a wording check and my own estimate was in it with a dollar sign in front of it, which is when I figured out that I'd been setting prices for years without being told.
A proposal landed in August to rebuild a client platform from scratch, and when I went digging in the shared drive I found two older ones saying almost exactly the same thing.
Two customers wrote in to say the sale wasn't on the store's homepage, I opened the homepage and the sale was right there, and it took me most of an afternoon to figure out that the difference between us was me.
A site I built in 2018 at a previous agency spent about two months redirecting phones to a sweepstakes page, and the invoice we sent for cleaning it up was larger than a year of the maintenance nobody had ever sold them.
Three people have left the agency since April, all three going-away parties happened on a video call, and last week I gave notice and made it four.
A client asked for a pop-up in the last minute of a December call and I said yes, because no on its own hands somebody a problem and I had nothing ready to say after it.
I spent three days on a maintenance retainer taking things out of a client's site, and the last thing on the list turned out to be holding up the one page the whole business hangs on.
A designer asked in March whether we could add a semibold for the card headings. I said yes inside a minute, on a project where I had written the performance budget myself in January.
I said about a week on a call and meant it, and two days later the word about was gone and there was a date in the plan with my name next to it.
The merchandiser at a client could tell me how long a price change took to appear on the store, morning and afternoon separately, and nobody on our side could have told you either number.
A client asked how the Black Friday weekend had gone compared to last year, and the chart I had to answer them with started in March.
Changing a phone number in a footer took me a full working day, and about 90 seconds of that day went on the phone number.
Item seven on the brief was a members area, and six weeks later I found out what it was for, which was a price list somebody was sending by hand once a month.
I went looking in Slack for the reasoning behind a strange line of code and search had nothing older than about five weeks, which turns out to be all the history we have.
A screenshot arrived six weeks into a build and nothing anywhere in the project said whether we supported that browser, so whether it counted as a defect got settled by whoever happened to be standing in the corridor.
The brief asked for new colors and what we handed over was a CMS migration, and the reason those two turned out to be the same project has nothing to do with the colors.
I built a style guide for a client site in January and by March I was copying buttons out of a template three folders away without it ever crossing my mind to open the thing I'd built.