Saturday, June 13, 2009

I’m fed up

I am a professional. A skilled professional with superlatively capable workers who perform difficult and oftentimes dangerous work in usually unpleasant environments. So why should people get to tell me that I am not worth getting paid for that skill set and those services?

Ever had to work on a tar and gravel roof in the middle of July? In the desert? Ever had a sewer drain line break on you in an 18” crawlspace under a home? Ever been surprised by a mountain lion looking for shelter when you are belly down in mud and clay under a mobile home on the Indian reservation, a mile from the paved road? Ever crawled through spider webs and ant hills in order to remove a dead fox from under a house?

I have. And my guys do. (Okay, the mountain lion wasn’t a routine situation.)

Our specialty is renovation, repair and retrofit, as opposed to new construction or public works projects (such as freeways, roads, dams and bridges). We fix what Mother Nature breaks, and replace what the customer doesn’t want any more.

But just as the worst patient for a doctor is another doctor, the worst client for a contractor is someone who is a long-since-retired contractor (or worse, the career construction laborer who thinks he knows as much as a contractor, yet never ran anything more complicated than a garage sale in his life). They think that because they helped build tract housing on Long Island back during the Korean War, they should be able to say how much I should charge for a modern day earthquake retrofit based on 2009 California Building Codes.

Or the person who has been flipping properties for several years during the recently-collapsed housing bubble, therefore they know how much I should charge for a complete renovation on a property they just bought, despite the fact that the property has never had a permit pulled on it in 52 years! (No, I’m not kidding.) They don’t appreciate how many strings I had to pull and how many hoops through which I have had to jump in order for them to keep the house on that property, rather than the pile of rubble the city could legally turn it into, with a simple red tag and a 30-day notice to demolish.

Yes, I know that the economy is in the shitter right now. I know that most retired persons are on a fixed income. If they don’t want to pay my prices, then they should learn to live with the problem. Don’t hire me to fix it under a written contract, and then demand more than half of the money back because they think they might have gotten a better deal somewhere else. (If that were true, then why didn’t they?) And then threaten to turn me into the Better Business Bureau if I don’t comply! Trust me, I have a pristine rating with the BBB and the CSLB, and my record in small claims court is eight wins and zero losses.

So be warned - the next SOB who threatens to haul me into court for something like this is going to have a full-sized can of extra-stinky worms dumped right on their pointy little heads. They will remember the phrase “punitive damages” for the rest of their days.