They kill me sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong… I love doing health education work. I also love that our projects are long, and gives us a chance to see how financial position far into the future. But having health educators for clients does have some hazards.

For example, I had a meeting with a client yesterday. A client who we have had the skeleton of her web site up for about 3 months and have been waiting patiently for them to give us content to fill in holes and then we’d launch their site. Can it ever be that simple? Ha ha. I sat there and took 5 pages of notes about all the changes to the structure she wanted, and finally reminded her that there may be extra charge for all these structural changes. She looked at me like I had a third eye. Then I politely reminded her THAT was why we had them sign off on a site map before we started building the thing. And then she flippantly said, “Well, the docs just can’t make up their mind as to what they want.” Fine, with me, but they ain’t getting that for free, sister.

We agree that all these changes will be due in mid-August. The FINAL changes, remember? The ones I do right before I launch the site? Then she tells me they want me to attend a staff meeting on August 18th, because “the docs have all sorts of questions about the site.” What the hell kind of questions? The fucking thing is supposed to be DONE then. I suggest that I come for about a half and hour to walk them through the site and it’s features. Nooooo, she wants me there for the full two hours to answer all these crazy questions they have (which I am sure will lead to more changes). Fine, lady, but you’re paying for it.

The other thing that health educators do is get caught up in the minutia. Like, on one of the pages we spelled “pancreatitis” wrong. A word, by the way, that I know very well how to spell now, after Rob’s ordeal. She mentioned it at least 10 times. Yes, yes, I GET IT. We made a mistake. It’s a 3 second fix. Let’s stack that up to the hours of crap you just unloaded on me because all your docs have to form a committee and pontificate over each syllable of the web site till the cows come home.

Pontificate. I use that word at work a lot. PhDs love to pontificate. You think you have the whole web site ready to go, and seriously – every single time – they will start chewing the fat of the why’s and how’s AGAIN. And AGAIN. And fucking AGAIN.

Which usually leaves me about 2 months to build a web site. When I was supposed to have 18 months.

Thank God I always pad my timelines to the extreme.