I was copyediting the website for a TV magazine’s annual awards vote. I asked the people in charge of the site to copy and paste the copy straight from the online voting form and put it into a Word document so it could be edited and styled up correctly. Three hours later, I received a Word document full of screengrabs of the online form, pasted in on top of each other. In the same email:

Client: Please finish this quickly. The site is going live in 90 minutes.  

I scrambled to go through and edit everything, with the added difficulty of having to transcribe from screenshots. I managed to get everything done in time, but the site didn’t go up until the next day anyway.

When the site did go up, while cross-checking I noticed that they’d mistakenly omitted an entire category.

Source: Clients from Hell