I dedicate this tale, with all due respect, to the George Morlan Plumbing Supply Company of Portland, OR. With its distinctive vintage sign giving Foster Road a happy neon jig in the evenings, this SE institution is a family business, building on a solid work ethic since 1927. Well done, House of Morlan.

So back in 2008, I responded to an ad posted on Craigslist, a business owner was looking for design and development work for a series of interconnected businesses’ websites. My initial pitch was well received, and the Anonymous Stranger was transformed into Titus the Plumber, a man whose mission was to knock the House of Morlan out of the market. Lord Titus would say it several times, he wanted to “bring George down”.

Pretender to the Throne

I was intrigued at the possibility here, elevating a half-developed brand into something that could compete with an established institution was an intriguing proposition. However, I was still tackling all design tasks as well as dev, operating as the one-man-band, my approach was very web-centric from day one and I did not get designs locked in before starting development.

The idea was to build a web frame that could be easily swapped out across three different properties, with some basic general universals (like a primitive framework) but per-site customs that would allow for variations in the clones.

My intention was to have the reusable frame complete by the end of the first site’s build, but we were re-working the design for the logo all the way up until live launch. Lord Titus insisted on tweaks and retweaks towards a “perfected” look, and he had other opinions whispering in his ear about what worked and what didn’t.

Unfortunately, I had failed to kick off the project with a bolted-down gameplan for how everything had to run, and we should have started with getting the new brand work locked in, then our design direction, then specific layouts. By building first, before we’d had our pages established, there was a lot of circular busy work.

The Time of Tyrant Titus

Once we had started opening the can on the project, it became very clear that Titus was a Tyrant, and while he was very disciplined and by-the-book when it came to his own projects and client work, he saw this as an opportunity to be creative and “think outside of the box”.

Right.

Matt Inman, aka The Oatmeal, has a great piece on exactly how this scenario goes down. My situation was no different.

Tyrant Titus was never clear on what he did not like about the dozen or so design iterations I gave him, just that they “didn’t work”. We finally landed at this sort of marblish green-to-blue amorphous smear for a page background, because he felt it looked like “clean water”. We reworked the header and how big the contact phone number and the phone graphic should be.

There is an old joke about resizing the logo that is both funny and not funny if you have been there.

Titus the Tyrant had his war council, and they were advising him on how I should be doing my job. There was his son, who had studied Graphic Design a little in college, and his wife, who did layout for the church newsletter. In the mind of Lord Titus, he had everything he needed inhouse EXCEPT for the execution, I was that missing last step that would allow his brain trust to fully realize his vision of mediocrity.

This is the equivalent of me saying to him that, because my uncle has broken several toilets, I should lurk over his shoulder while he fixes my toilet and tell him what wrench he should be using when. Also pointing out every action of his that I don’t understand as a mistake, as in the eyes of Lord Titus, I could do no right.

I knew something had gone horribly wrong when, on a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon, I found myself adding text to “illustrations” his son had “prepared” in Microsoft Paint (95 edition), and minding notes to go heavy on the text drop shadow, it really made it “pop” (according to his wife).

Billable hours should never come at the cost of your self respect.

The Emperor is Stark Flipping Naked

So what does one do in such a situation? We quit. Do we make a big stupid scene and scream up and down on Titus about his incompetence? No. The only stupid thing here would be not getting paid for every second that you are in the salt mine for this fool. This client is an idiot and there is a reason we are the fourth web talent he’s had in four years, he is impossible to work with and he knows it (on some level).

If you come out guns blazing and “telling the truth”, all you are doing is giving the tyrant ammunition for an argument against your professionalism. In these times of pronounced stress, the key is to remain unemotional and unmoved. You are not angry, you are “tapped for bandwidth”. You don’t need to slam doors and be grandiose, you need to “wrap this up to meet other obligations. The larger project would have been good but we’ve more than exceeded expected timeline”.

If you don’t give reason to question your professionalism, there should never be any question about your money.

Now, in thinking about what could have been done differently with Tyrant Titus, I can spot several grievous errors on my part.

1. In the initial pitch, I should have adhered to a more stringent process and made Titus commit to it. Namely, finalized designs before beginning development. The first mistake was allowing him to see anything in code before we had an approved and locked design.
2. At the first mention of a son or a wife or an anybody else with 2c that would have affected my work, I should have been out the door. And there’s no problem with that, Titus was the one who changed the deal after kick off. You don’t hire an architect and show them your child’s drawings.
3. If you are getting a bad read on a client or a project, if you find yourself swapping a sunny weekend afternoon for menial grunt work that defeats the purpose of your presence on a project but is keeping the client happy, get out. You are putting the client’s happiness ahead of your own, you are valuing their money more than your time. The difference between time and money is that you can never make more time.

Tyrant Titus is still on the scene, I see his trucks here and there in Portland, they make me giggle. In prep for this article, I looked at his current web presence. One of my many successors supplied him with a very bland and generic WordPress template, maybe his son took a night course. But his whole nonsense of networked sites for different companies never came true, he has his one sad little site with the same illustrations, refried eggs.

Nobody wants to work with an asshole.

Meanwhile, the lights of the George Morlan sign continue to twinkle and shine in the Foster Powell evening, and it is no wolf tickets to say that my fellow denizens of Foster Road and I regularly lift a glass in love of our local beacon.

All hail the King of Portland plumbing supply, it will take more than a half ass to snatch the crown.