I Lost My First Big Client Because I Refused to Lie

Clients don’t always bring you money, but you can learn important lessons.

Before I seriously dived into the writing world, I didn’t know being a writer often means being a liar. To some extent, in every job I had, I was expected to be a little liar.

Some lies are not a big deal and didn’t have a crucial impact on people’s life. When I worked in a coffee shop, I stopped serving coffee 20 min before closing. Usually, we didn’t even have customers so late, but if they came, I said I already cleaned the coffee machine, and I used the cleaning product. Dangerous chemicals scare people away.

I didn’t do it because I was lazy but because my company gave me half an hour after closing to clean the shop. Only this 30min was paid, so we needed to do some cleaning before closing, and we could finish on time. Every waiter writer who reads this will chuckle because they know that it is impossible to serve the coffee until the end of opening hours.

I think this lie was harmless. There were several coffee shops around our place so people could still get their coffee, and I would finish on time.

Thinking back, I often lied at work because I never have enough people or time to pleased everyone. No, we don’t have hot chocolate (we have, but I don’t have time to do it — I have 20 coffees coming before). No, we don’t have this shirt (I’m not sure if we have it, but I can send nobody to check because I don’t have a coworker on the floor). There will be a 20 min wait for the food (it will be between 10–15 min, but I always say more because otherwise, I have people on my neck, yelling where is their food).

I don’t think these lies are awful — we don’t live in a truthful world. The system isn’t made to offer high-quality service, but it is more about how much money we can make while saving as much money as possible.
In every job I had, I needed to improvise because I never have enough time or workforce.

I had some smaller writing gigs when I was a newbie writer. Then I got a big client, a company selling food supplements like proteins, vitamins, etc.

Related posts:

I posted my first ever youtube-video on march 27 2019. Back then I knew nothing about composing a video, editing or anything about what does it on youtube. It has now been 8 months and I have a lot…

The scene at the Capitol Building yesterday was a farce and an embarrassment for our country. This was an attempted violent overthrow of the government to prevent the inauguration of the duly elected…

The Sui Name Service NFT Collection contains 10,000 randomly generated PFPs. The collection will be first come, first-serve for Storks. After Storks are done registering and if supplies last, we will…