Web design, every day. Customer has a shit site, they know it’s shit, they want to pay someone $$$ to do a new site, and they want to change 75% of the new design because they think they know better than the designer...
My first reaction was to think ‘what a terrible job the previous lot did, I’m sure we can do better than that’.
But it’s always the clients fault.
Either they slowly unpick all the design decisions so the new site is no better than the old one, or they balk at the cost, get it developed on the cheap overseas, then pay us more than the original quote to fix all the resulting problems.
Good clients already have good websites.
It will quickly pay for itself: The developer can drag a duck into the scene and configure it to define how many hours it will take to remove, and what kind of removal interface and effect to use. Then when they show the demo to the client, and the client demands "Remove the duck!", then can say "Ok. That will take X hours." Then they simply type some secret hot keys or click on some invisible hot spots for a while, and the duck will pop up a count-down timer and slowly start shrinking or dissolving or whatever, until it finally disappears after X hours with a puff of smoke, and then the developer can bill the client for that many hours.
I would love to read a treatment of why the client-designer relationship is often so dysfunctional. I know we all can trot out ideas, but I want an in-depth, serious, unsarcastic treatment, all the better if it points to a cure.