As soon as I saw the projector come out, I knew it would end in tears.

This morning the Riddler called us into the bored room to discuss a phone call he received yesterday. He began detailing how a representative of a maritime province had contacted him about adding to or improving their web-based education. He showed us their existing offering and asked for our thoughts.

On what, exactly?

The Rid had decided it was time to discuss how we could restructure our content to suit the set-up of the existing web site. Unfortunately, no need for this had been requested by the client. The following bullets had not been discussed during the initial consultation, either:

  • what they’re looking for
  • what the business model is
  • budget
  • whether they want to buy content or hire a development team

And yet, the Riddler was convinced we should come up with some design ideas to propose. We had to re-explain three times that it isn’t possible to propose a design without knowing a few needs and parameters.

It also came out about halfway through that the maritime province was misidentified as the client…it was a western province that contacted us. No research had been done on what they had, or wanted either.

And lo, the sledgehammer of silence smote us all.

In addition, the Riddler was showing all of this through a projector and attempting to navigate around the maritime site and look up different sites while we asked him questions.

Despite the presence of the Google search bar in the browser window, the Rid needed to surf to the Google page every time he wanted to look up something new. So we ended up with 10-12 different tabs opened up, all on sites that were not really related to anything we were talking about. The meeting ended with the Riddler idly flipping between the tabs, trying to figure out what he originally wanted to show us.

There’s nothing quite like having your chief visionary architect of web development show you he’s incapable of using a browser.

Commentary

I remember the gentle pummelling of the SOS (Sledgehammer of Silence). It’s like the Riddler is trying to decide who to blame for the lack of creativity in the room. I think he’s crying on the inside.
- Shuh

Don’t cry for me, Riddlertina.
- GHC