Generally, when people approach me to work with them, they come bearing a certain number of assumptions about web designers. While it’s nice that someone somewhere who has clearly never met me thinks I’m a latte-drinking, WACOM-owning, Mac-plugged hipster, the reality is that I sit here most days in my pyjamas, working away on an ageing Dell desktop and trying to figure out how to open those new-fangled .docx document types.

And while I do take my coffee very seriously, my credibility in this arena is greatly diminished by the fact that I do not know how to roast my own coffee beans. It’s very hard to hold my head up at conventions for swanky web designers, which explains why I don’t go to those. (That plus I don’t get invited.)

So here, for your Monday morning amusement, are the Top Ten Things You Never Want to Hear About Your Web Designer:

• I am completely self-taught. I have never taken a web design, coding or marketing class, and am thus entirely unqualified for pretty much any job you might want to hire me for. I’m pretty OK with that.
• I learned to code HTML creating free pages on GeoCities, because I wanted to edit the colours on the provided templates.
• I learned to build an SQL query in FrontPage. At the time, it was the only visual builder around and it opened up the world of databases to me. I will be forever grateful.
• On the very rare occasions when I actually need to create a table for, you know, tabular data, I still use FrontPage, mostly because it’s so rare I can’t really remember how to code tables any more.
• I learned basic CSS from a woman named Vee McLaughlin over many hours in an ICQ chat window. She was incredibly patient and to a huge extent, I owe her my entire career.
• I live in the Motherfucking Bank Guilt Spiral. It is impossible for me to blog if I owe any client work. I always owe at least one client work; therefore I almost never blog. Or do laundry. Or buy groceries. Or go to the bank.
• I do not use PhotoShop. I mean, I can, but 98% of the non-vector graphics I create are done in PaintShop Pro. The version I use was released in March of 2000. I will never upgrade it.
• I overwrote a client’s live site by accident in 2001. There was no backup. I still have nightmares about it and have never made that mistake again.
• I stuck the color #92BD5D in my palette back in the day when we used only web-safe colours, and waited more than 10 years for it to become trendy so I could use it pretty much constantly. When it becomes passée, I may never work again.
• I am overwhelmed by data and have not opened my RSS reader in a year. 99% of my reading list comes from Twitter. I do not subscribe to Smashing Magazine, Mashable or anything else I’m supposed to be reading, including your blog.

The final blow to my credibility:

I own no Apple products and there is no part of me that wants an iPhone.