Wild Dingo

Not too long ago, a colleague asked me to review her client’s web site from both a marketing and web design/development perspective and to come up with a site architecture and some ideas on how to improve it. Naturally, I resisted, citing that it was intellectual property and that I didn’t have time to offer free consultation. Very quickly she responded, “I want to hire you to consult on this project, pay you for your critique and ideas.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Someone wants to hire me to criticize their web site? You mean, they want to hire me to be…mean? Surely this can’t be. Being mean is one of my favorite things to do. I like being mean so much that I even married a mean guy. No, he’s not wife-beater mean. He’s mean like, “Jules, your mouth RPM’s are going faster than your pedaling-RPMs” mean. Or mean like, he tries to make me give him my heart rate monitor when I’m riding my bike to make sure I’m working hard enough. And mean like, when he sees a neighbor with trash decorating his front yard, he’ll comment so sarcastically, that I can’t help but gush with love.

Yes, it’s true. I like mean people. And I like being mean. But mostly, I like being mean about ridiculous stuff like poor marketing, bad products, bad advice, bad ideas, bad design and bad taste. And the list goes on. This is probably why I bonded so well with the dingo. She wasn’t a “nice” dog at all. No, in fact, she was a bit mean.  When I first met her, she ate my underwear. But they were an ugly pair of underwear, so she was justified. Yes, we understood each other quite well. Our tolerance for idiocracy was equally matched which made us a nice pair. 

Even one of my peers in my yoga teacher training program called me “sadistic.” I took it as a compliment. It makes you want to come to one of my classes, huh? Secretly, you’re dying to know just how mean I am in a yoga class.

Once I worked for a company that didn’t treat its customers very well. Our marketing department had to design holiday cards for the customers. My idea was to write “Happy Holidays” on the cover, and “you son of a b—ch,” on the inside. That idea didn’t go over too well. Although the V.P. found it so humorous, he shared it with his wife, who would later send me Christmas cards that said exactly that!

I get a lot of clients who tell me their customers have difficulty logging in. The problem is usually user-error. So sometimes when I’m designing a web site that features “login” functions, I secretly want to write in the re-direct page, “Whoops! You moron! You didn’t type your username or password correctly.  Go back to high school and learn to type. Then come back here and try again.”  Needless to say, this never goes over well. Still, it can’t hurt to fantasize.

But when I was being hired to be mean, well, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. Sigh. Once in a while, the universe throws me a delectable bone, just like this. And I savor every bit of it.

Of course I had to balance all my criticisms with some useful constructive feedback of better ways to design, marketing and develop content. You can’t exactly be taken seriously if you don’t have better alternatives to present. Still, I delighted in being mean, err …being a critic and getting paid for it so much that I’m considering adding “constructive critic” under my list of services. But perhaps I should discount it. It doesn’t seem right to make too much money having that much fun.