Apropos of nothing, I used to run into that issue with clients that felt I should be able to to do x, y, and z stuff that were out of spec, and out of scope. I would advise them that going down that road would incur 'unknown' additional costs (for I am not a mind reader, unable to parse out some ill-defined, changeable fantasy and come up with an estimate). They usually didn't go for it. In some few cases they did, and I got several days or even weeks of billable work. One cat felt we should be able to produce a computer game like Madden Football (this was ~1995), with a team of 3 people, none of whom were programmers (the platform was Macromedia Director) for a few thou $$$. We made a game to graphically demonstrate our capabilities. The idea was dropped.
“Human in Bear Suit Was Used to Defraud Insurance Companies”
Madden in... Director? Wow, haha. I made a sort of Pac-man thing in Flash once, that was complicated enough for me and that was years later when Director was already obsolete.
It was interesting for about five minutes when I watched him, but then rather dull. Ashley wasn't one of life's great conversationalists. He set up a tripod with a little box on top: the laser. Then he put 3 tiny paper targets around the kitchen. The rest of the time he spent on a tablet thing, taking dozens of photos, endlessly tapping in information, occasionally putting a little piece of yellow tape down and pointing the laser spot at it. Sometimes he put little pins on stands down and pointed the laser at them. Mainly he tapped, photographed, and said nothing. It took a long time, nearly two hours. I went and did something else, but I could hear every click and tap. At the end of the day, after he'd gone, he emailed me a detailed plan of the various worktop pieces. Apparently this is accurate to less than a millimetre. One piece will take 4 men to carry. Apparently.
