Emergency Home Damaged Phone Call Problems
There seems to be a big demand for my construction
stories. I've written a few of them and to my surprise, people want
more. I have e-mails from people all over the United States that would
like to hear more of them, so let's get started.
It was about one o'clock in the morning when a woman called me
hysterical about water that was leaking through her roof. “It's leaking
all over the place, I have buckets, towels and everything else spread
out all over the living room floor. I need you to get over here as soon
as you can.”
I couldn't get one word in. All I wanted to do was tell her that I
wasn't set up to do emergency home repairs. She said,” You need to come
over here as soon as you can, there's water everywhere. How long is it
going to take you to get over here? This is an emergency, do you
understand what I'm telling you? Please, I'll pay you, just get over
here as soon as you can.”
It took me 15 minutes to explain that I don't do emergency home repairs
to this woman. She played every sympathy card that she could and even
had her husband talk to me, but I told her that I'm not an emergency
repair contractor. I finally had to hang up the phone and then
disconnected it from the wall.
Obviously, this was before cell phones, remember the phones you used to
plug into the walls… that's what I was talking on. The woman called me a
few days later, telling me off. I was the rudest contractor she had ever
talked to and we would never be doing business together. I tried to get
one word in again, but she violently hung up the phone.
You're going to find this hard to believe, but this woman needed her
bathroom remodeled, a few years later and called me. I didn't remember
who she was and she didn't remember who I was, until I started working
on her bathroom remodel.
We both started laughing and put the miserable experience behind us, but
I did get a word in this time and was able to explain why I didn't do
emergency home repairs. I guess weird things happen all the time and
this was one of them.