When I was first starting out in business for myself, I was given the following advice if I were ever offered to quote for a job which I didn't want to do, for whatever reason - work out the price and then double it and submit this figure as your firm quotation. If you don't get the job, that's fine, because you didn't want to do it anyway. However, if the client is prepared to pay a high price, then at least you'll know that the rewards will be worth it, in the end.

This was one such job. My instructions were simple - produce by hand, labels for whisky decanters in an old style which was obviously handwritten (in other words, not too neat). The writing was to be in black with the heading in gold paint or ink. Obviously, it would have been much cheaper to have had them printed, but they wanted to say, on the back label, "to reflect the quality of this very rare, single grain whisky, every front label has been handwritten".

Over a six month period, I produced, by hand, 2,500 decanter labels as below. Even although I wrote them over a long period, they were still mind-numbingly boring to write. Fortunately, I was very well paid for the job and I suppose that it was very good practice.

As I said, the whole job could have been printed, and it would have looked pretty much the same, at a fraction of the cost. However, the customer is always right and there is always some nut somewhere, prepared to take on work like this!

Uh, I don't suppose you have any of the whisky?

I did, but my son drank it. He likes it - I don't!

This is clearly the sort of job that could drive one to drink! Pardon the dreadful pun.