Tales about the terminally clueless

Some stories make you cry. Others make you stare in wonderment. Others make you shudder, and some make you run screaming from the room.

Put this one from Nancy Friedman at Wordworking/Away With Words in all those categories -- plus the one labeled "if you ever get too big for your britches as a writer and want to really know what some people think the real value of your work is."

She tells the story of a business client, one that actually seemed to have a clue, who had laid out a plan for a text-heavy, highly interlinked Web site. She says it would be about 100 pages and as many as 50,000 words. She submitted an estimate:

The client's response? "But...but...I'm just a start-up! I can't afford to pay this!" And then the client did something that would have astonished me if I weren't beyond astonishment in such matters: the client advertised on Craigslist for a writer or writers to write the content for free. "I know it'll be bad," the client told me, ever so matter-of-factly. "But then maybe I can pay you by the hour to fix it up."

Yep, just feeds the old ego, doesn't it?