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| From Remodeling 2009 |
The wife and I recently got gutters installed on our house. Overall, they're really awesome, but there's this one place that's not right and needs to be fixed, but the gutter company has been dragging their feet on (fortunately it means I'm also dragging my feet on paying them, so at least I have some leverage). Essentially the whole thing boils down to improperly explained for what a part was, and then not being able to take the day off to supervise the whole thing (something that's immensely important for really any work somebody else is doing to your place).
After playing phone-tag with the sales rep for this large gutter company we got in touch earlier this afternoon an I said I needed a do-over on some of the work, and asked if he could meet me out there to pull a new piece. He then said, "No problem, I'll need to call into the office, see who we can get down there and get it taken care of for you."
Later this afternoon I got a call-back from him, I was pretty stoked at the potential fast turn-around and said, "[Contractor's Name] what's up?"
He then replies with the following:
"I got this customer [Otis] out here and he's being a little bitch. Yeah, there's something he's just being nitpicky about and we already sent a guy out there*. Frankly we can do it, but I'm gonna need him to be there cause I got no clue what he wants. Trying not to be a dick, but don't need this from him. When we get somebody in the area can we just swing by and fix the problem. I mean, what do you think I should do?"
*They did send somebody, but they wouldn't allow him to do the job necessary because they wanted to see if the patch-job would work...it didn't.
My response:
"Well, first off, if I were you I'd make sure that I'm not calling my customer when laying into them."
[Begin stammering and jaw on floor]
"Secondly, I hope you realize I'm not trying to be a "little bitch" about this. It's just that I spent several thousand dollars for your product and I want to make sure I'm satisfied with it before I consider the job to be done. Most everything is great, but there's just one piece that needs to be fixed."
From there on the rest of the conversation was in the following vien,
"I'm so sorry"
"God, today's just been the worst day"
"I've had like 10 bad calls in a row"
"I shouldn't have called you that"
"Oh man, there's nothing I can do to take any of that back now"
"I shouldn't have used language like that even when calling into the office"
"Oh, don't worry I'm going to get you taken care of"
"I'm so sorry"
Me, "Not a problem, I understand, stuff like this happens, let's just get it taken care of"
I think that was the conclusion of the absolute worst phone-call of that sales guy's career. Fortunately I got a good laugh out of it, and hopefully we'll now get the work done right.
