mikeeaton79

Trade CONtractors

So I guess this ties into my last post about Lowe’s, but this has been such a source of sarcasm for me lately that at the risk of being redundant, I couldn’t deprive you of this rant.

For those of you who know me well, you know that I ran a mostly residential painting business for 15 years. It took a little time to build up, but it became a great business full of repeat customers and I made a good living doing it. About 5 years ago I shut down the business to accept a job offer doing something related to my business without the physically brutal side effects of painting. It was an easy decision from a physical standpoint, because I was basically in pain management at the time for a torn shoulder. It was also a tough decision from a freedom and entrepreneurial mindset, because I like to run my own railroad and set my own schedule. Y’all know that working for someone else is tough when you struggle with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Anyhow, I still get calls from my old clients asking me to do work for them, and sometimes I do, on weekends and evenings, to make extra money and also because I don’t want to subject them to the dumpster fire that is most of the painting contractors in our area.

All of this to say: I was a contractor, and I had a fantastic business. 99.9% of the contractors I have either recommended or reached out to in the past 5 years have proved to be the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked. (Simpsons reference. Stay with me.) Here is a short list of why my business worked, and what everyone else in the freaking contractor world can’t seem to wrap their apathetic minds around.

Return Phone Calls. I fought the urge and pressure to get a cell phone. Cell phones were a thing for years before I let a beautiful woman talk me into getting one so she could talk to me whenever she wanted. Up to that point, I had an answering machine on my land line. I would check my messages and call people back in the evening when I got home from work. The only reason I agreed to get a cell phone was because I really wanted to marry this girl and didn’t think that giving her the impression right off the bat that I didn’t want to talk to her would be a poor choice. (P.S. Mission accomplished.) The point is that we all have phones and have the ability and technology to return phone calls, especially when the person calling WANTS TO GIVE YOU MONEY IN RETURN FOR YOUR SERVICES. I am really struggling right now with vendors in my current job for the same damn reason, except now they are ignoring phone calls over tens of thousands of dollars in potential revenue, instead of the smaller amounts ignored by small trade contractors.
Show Up for the Estimate. So if you have ever been a contractor or called a contractor, you know that this is step two in the sales pitch portion of landing the work. Punctuality is key here, but beyond that, you need to show up and present yourself in a way that doesn’t make the customer want to rent a port-a-john so they can keep you out of their house on the off chance that you get the job. You’d be surprised how many times I got the job because the home owner was afraid to let the other guys that bid the job set foot into their house. If you can’t make it to the estimate….CALL AND TELL THE CLIENT. Just not showing up is a sign that you don’t value their time, and think that whatever you are doing is more important. It isn’t. In 15 years of running a business, I missed one scheduled estimate, and it was because I wrote the bid date and time in my calendar one day later than it should have been. I called the client and apologized profusely, and didn’t get the opportunity to reschedule. Part two of this is: ACTUALLY GIVE THE CLIENT AN ESTIMATE.
Um…SHOW UP TO DO THE WORK. This is the point in the process that I can’t seem to wrap my mind around. You returned a phone call…that was hard. You showed up for the estimate…that was harder. You won the job…that was the turning point. Then you ghosted the client?? What in the ever-loving hell. I just had this happen to me. I got in touch with a guy to do some work at my cabin, he came out, gave me a quote, I accepted, we set a rough date, then…chirp chirp. I called him several times. No response. This guy was a nice guy, seemed to be good at what he does, and now I will never call him or recommend him to anyone. In a small country town like mine, this has just cost him a dozen more jobs. I know people. I have people ask me for recommendations all the time, because they trust me and trust my judgement. Guess who won’t make that list? Yep, you.
Technology Might Not Be Your Strong Suit, but Figure it Out. Here is another story from the past two months (that is how rampant this trend of crappy contractors is in my life right now). I finally got a guy to come out and look at some concrete work I needed done. He was not super easy to get in touch with, and it took several conversations to set the time for him to look at it, but he did show up. He was pretty rough around the edges, but I needed a guy to pour concrete…not be a nanny for our kid. After walking around, looking at some of the projects and talking about time frames, he told me he would write up the estimate. I asked if he would email it to me, to which he replied, “You young people and your f**king email and your f**king texts”. Ok, overlooking the apparent ease of using the mother of all dirty words…the F dash dash dash word to a total stranger that you want to convince to hire you…this guy was like five years older than me. I’m 41 years old and old enough to remember our first VCR and DVD players, but young enough to know how to text and do email. There is probably a 20 year margin on top of my age where technology like this has been around long enough that you really have no excuse to not use it. I mean, I wasn’t asking him to re-calibrate the space station’s trajectory or even order tacos from door dash. IT WAS EMAIL. This guy told me he would have his wife write up the quote, (I’m assuming because you can’t get autocorrect for a ball point pen, and if he wrote it, it would have so many spelling errors that I wouldn’t know what it said. Plus because apparently if I were 5 years older I would be much more misogynistic and demand that my wife also be my secretary…), and then he would have her MAIL it to me. I sort of laughed and said ok. That was two months ago. Maybe the USPS lost the letter…
Finish the Job, Clean Up, and Fix the Crap You Screwed Up. Finishing the job seems like a no brainer, but I STILL have projects from contractors that remain unfinished. Usually, you don’t get completely paid until the job is completed and the client approves, but there are some pretty dumb people out there that pay their contractors before the work is completely done. If you are reading this and you have done that…it’s on you. It should only take once for you to learn this lesson. The only money I ever collected prior to being done with a project was occasionally materials money, and that was after I had the materials on site and the client could physically see them. I should have mentioned this earlier, but throughout the actual work process, clean up at the end of each day and don’t leave a huge mess that makes the neighbors think that they accidentally live in Morrow County. (Sorry to all of my Morrow County friends, but your area has the award for number of Ohio properties that have been considered for Hoarding: Buried Alive.) At the end of the job, there shouldn’t be empty soda bottles or Pop-Tart wrappers in the client’s bushes. Another thing is to fix any mistakes before you leave and be willing to come back if there is something that doesn’t work right or needs to be touched up. I still have dirty hand prints on my vaulted ceiling around the fireplace because the stone guy didn’t bother to take a damp rag and wipe it off before he took the scaffolding down. I think I leave the smudges up there to remind me how timid I used to be, and how that was a turning point in my self confidence that makes me demand more than the bare minimum out of someone that I am trading money for their services. Also, it gives me useful illustrations for blog topics.

In conclusion, I have some advice for all of you out there that are searching for a reliable way to get that project at your house done. YouTube. I just finished a bathroom in my basement, and my disgust with contractors has motivated me to learn how to do stuff myself. I am now relatively good at framing, electric, drywall, and most of the other things that I would’ve hired out. I had two small parts of this project that I paid a friend to help me with, but that’s it. Yes, I wired the light switch upside down initially, and yes there is still a fair amount of profanity haze floating above the room. But the price was right, and this contractor showed up when he said he would. I’ll throw a picture at the top so you know I’m not making all of this up…

If you do have a contractor that is reliable and does good work, fantastic. Be prepared to pay more for the service, because good contractors know how much of a wasteland the world of contracting is, and they are capitalizing on their simplistic ability to return a call and show up when they say they will. I was never the cheapest painter in town. I can tell you who was, and they are still puttering around town in their junky trucks, selling low expectations and reeking of weed and booze. I sold peace of mind, reliability, and a solid product….and my customers weren’t afraid to let me use their bathrooms.

(P.S. – For full disclosure- yes, in 15 years I did have unsatisfied customers. I can count them on one hand though, and they were unhappy for a couple reasons. 1. We all learn and grow throughout the years, and I did my share of screwing things up and having to fix them. Always be willing to admit your mistakes and be willing to fix it. 2. A couple of them were just surly, angry people that weren’t going to be happy in any case or were trying to get a job done for free. Those people exist, and I got pretty good at figuring out who those people were early on and estimating high to either not get the job or make the B.S. worth it.)

Lowe’s and other such nonsense.

So, this one has been years in the making. I have had probably 100 similar experiences exactly like this one. I don’t know how many of you have had the utter joy and privilege of spending any time in a large chain hardware store, but if you haven’t, please go in and bask in the unbridled incompetence and apathy of a business where the mission statement is…”Who Cares.”

I have worked in some form of the trades for around 20 years now, and regardless of what trade you are in, there will always be a necessity to make a trip to pick up some random item from the hardware store. On some occasions, I would be able to go to our local hardware store, which, quite frankly, has the opposite customer service mindset of our big box store, Lowe’s. (There is a pretty great scene in Parks and Recreation where Ron Swanson walks in to Lowe’s and when asked by an employee if he needs help. He stops, looks the kid in the eye and says, “I know more than you.” This is 100% me.)

I don’t mind mentioning the name of our small local store, because even with my level of sarcasm, I really can’t say enough in favor of G.R. Smith. In the true essence of this blog, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about how wonderful G.R. Smith is, but rather how incredibly terrible Lowe’s is. The minute you walk in G.R. Smith, you are met every ten seconds by an employee asking you what they can help you with, and then walking you directly to the location of that item. The only negative I could mention, and it’s a stretch, is that they are almost TOO helpful.

Lowe’s, by comparison, pushes an experience that would indicate that the employees have some sort of contest going to see how uncomfortable and forlorn they can make each customer feel, assuming that the customer can even find an employee in this intentionally crafted game of hide and seek.

Last night, after checking the quantity of a stock white ceramic tile online, I went into Lowe’s to pick up the tile. The computer said they had 4,500 tiles on hand, and I only needed about 1,200. Seems like a simple transaction, yes? There were only a couple half-smashed boxes on the shelf, so I asked the employee in the next aisle for help locating it.

The way he rolled his eyes above his COVID mask elevated my blood pressure a couple of degrees.

He walked down the aisle and looked for like 20 seconds at some boxes on the top shelf, and then said, “I don’t see any, but let me go find someone who works in flooring.”

Ok, fine. So I waited.

After about 5 minutes, I walked over to the flooring desk and asked a (different) employee sitting there what the story was.

“Oh did you need help?”

Yes, dummy. Y’all won’t let me climb all over the shelving units looking for stuff myself, so I am unfortunately resigned to the corporate guideline of needing assistance from someone being paid by Lowe’s to sit on their ass and avoid customer contact.

“You already asked someone? Who? Oh, he just went to lunch.”

Great. I hope I never get to a point where someone is in need of my help and halfway through the process of looking for someone else to delegate that to, I look at my watch and think… “Screw them. It’s Hot Pocket time.”

After another 10 minutes, she comes back and explains that the only guy that knows where that tile is located is on break, so it’ll be a few minutes. The guy finally comes out, they spend yet another 10 minutes setting up the aisle barriers and she wanders into the adjacent aisle and engages in conversation with someone else about school starting up again.

In the meantime the guy on the forklift is repeatedly asking loudly if the next aisle is clear… to no one in particular. Wait, that’s not true. He was asking HER, because it was HER job to yell back at him that the aisle was clear so he could legally get my mother-loving tiles off the top shelf without the risk of dropping them into the next aisle and crushing a guy that had been staring at shelf paper for 30 minutes.

When he finally gets it down, he asks me (jokingly I hope) if I would buy the entire pallet so it would save him the trouble of stacking the boxes individually on the bottom shelf….where they should have been ALL ALONG.

Both employees brought up the fact that a different customer a couple days earlier had been in there looking for the same tile and they hadn’t been able to locate it. I feel like that is the quintessential Lowe’s experience, what that customer had enjoyed. You come in for a specific thing, and maybe you can find one employee to half-assed look for it, and then you accept defeat and walk away as a loser.

To cap off this evening, the guy that got the tile down said loudly to his co-worker, “I sure hope lifting these boxes doesn’t make me tear my stitches. I don’t know what Lowe’s will do about that!”

Hopefully let you bleed out and bury you in one of the mulch pits out in the garden area. I’ve been out there too.

With the helpful enthusiasm of the outdoor department workers, you’d never be discovered unless a customer dug you up with their own hands.

Nonessential Essential Items: Consumers vs Me

So, I know its been a while since I posted anything. But I ran into a good friend and former client yesterday at the grocery store, or as I call it, “the land of irrational behavior and limitless paranoia.” She mentioned she missed my snarky posts–and I feel like in an era of fear, maybe a dose of unfounded sarcasm could help everyone devolve further into some version of a manufactured Mad Max society, which I would love to be a part of.

Its not that I haven’t had any snarky thoughts. Oh no, those have been if nothing else increased by propaganda (lightly sprinkled with truth) media blitzes, as well as the constant barrage of posts on social media shaming people on both sides of the COVID terror scale. The upcoming re-opening of society has taken on a different meaning for me, because coinciding with that opening will be approximately the time Facebook starts showing me the posts of all the people I’ve snoozed during the stay-at-home order.

Before you get your panties in a twist, yes, I understand the financial toll this has taken on many, and I have taken the virus as seriously as a rational, non-hoarding American citizen should. I have a close friend that works as a nurse in the ICU at OSU. He asked me a couple of days ago if I thought I could do his job. The answer was an immediate no. I have a lot of respect for our first responders and medical community folks. But I would fail at that job, mostly because I think the medical community would frown on a nurse humanely smothering patients with a pillow based on my personal assessment of their quality of life.

This patient can’t ever drink again. *Smother*

This patient needs to cut red meat out of his diet. *Smother*

This disclaimer is basically in here to tell you that I don’t need you to send me messages telling me how serious this crisis is and how I need to wear a mask in the shower or watch a ping pong ball and mousetrap video because I’m too stupid to understand the laws of virus transmission and compounding. If you feel the need to do that, chances are you have already been snoozed because of your daily FB posts.

The takeaway from this pandemic, from my perspective, says more about human behavior and mob mentality than it does about a simple scientific spread of a virus.

The following are items from the grocery or wholesale stores I personally watched become scarce, even temporarily. For some items, I can sort of understand the reasons behind the frenzy, and for others… I think people are just nuts.

Toilet paper: I get it. Toilet paper is one of those household items that never seems important until you’re out of it. I’m reasonably sure everyone has had that moment where you have an “immediate” need to use the facilities, and then realize only too late that the TP roll is out. I don’t dispute this one. However, my observation of this one ventured more in line with one of my favorite “can’t look away” shows, Hoarding: Buried Alive. Now, I love this show–but mostly because I tend to find a room in the house to clean out after watching every episode. I watch it, and I have this condescending attitude toward people that struggle with compulsive hoarding, as if I don’t have my own childhood comic books and baseball cards stored away in boxes cluttering up our guest room closet because “they’ll be worth something someday”. No, they won’t. My dad has a touch of compulsive hoarding, and I always gave him grief about it until one of my friends came over to help me cut down a tree for my folks with his chainsaw. My dad asked him if he had a case for his chainsaw, to which my friend replied “no.” Dad went out to the shed, cluttered through the junk, and came out with an empty chainsaw case that fit the chainsaw perfectly. That’s vindication for an oppressed hoarder. All that said, the hoarding of toilet paper has been downright impressive. More impressive though, have been the videos from Costco or Sam’s Club, when they get a new skid of TP in, and the people swarm it in a frenzy, like those catfish at the state fair when the DNR guy throws a handful of those rabbit food pellets into the water. When this thing is all over, I hope folks that hoarded toilet paper are also able to eat that toilet paper like that Strange Addictions show, because I just don’t think the black market value will hold true.
Chicken and onions: These were was a little weird. I make a curry chicken dinner (and make pretty much all the dinners) at our house once every couple of weeks, mostly because my amazing wife is domestically challenged, and because if I didn’t we would die. Well, we wouldn’t die. We would just have salads for every meal, and that in and of itself would make me WANT to die. I went to the grocery store around week two of stay-at-home-mageddon, and there were two things that were completely out: 1. Chicken, and 2. onions. Chicken was out everywhere, and there was only one badly damaged onion still on the shelf. At what point did some guy sitting at home suddenly jump up and say, “Holy hell–our chicken supply is waning! Where did all of our onions go?? Margaret, get your hazmat suit, we’re making a chicken and onion run!” Now, if you are as passionate about Indian food as I am, which likely not many of you are, setting your mind on curry chicken and having your dreams squashed can lead to violence. I’m pretty sure Mahatma Ghandi himself would’ve beat his grocer to death if he couldn’t make his favorite korma on chicken korma Wednesday. That was a sad day in the land of first world problems.
Popcorn: The only thing I can logically attribute this one to is the hours of Netflix bingeing happening for so many. I walked through two different grocery stores in the same day, and both had completely bare popcorn shelves. So, this, along with other short supply items, seems like it has two possibilities for the shortage. First, mob mentality could be driving it. If you walk in a store during a time period where widespread panic rules the day and you see someone with a cart filled with nothing but popcorn, you can interpret that two ways:

1: Lunatic behavior. (But others might see that as someone who has insider information into “Big Popcorn” supply chains. I put a couple cases of Corona in my cart, but folks didn’t see me as having the scoop on the Mexican beer market, and didn’t follow suit.)

2. A brilliant marketing ploy by Orville’s grandson Wilbur Redenbacher to cut shipping quantity and create scarcity. I’m not saying this is what happened, but Wilbur is a sneaky bastard.
Butter: The butter fiasco was just last week. I have been out grocery shopping weekly for my folks because they are both high risk. Well, that’s what I tell everyone, but secretly I do it because the tables have turned and now I get to tell THEM where they can and can’t go. It’s a really small amount of power, but I am letting it go completely to my head. Mom needed two blocks of butter. Blocks… I think that’s the term for the container 4 sticks come in. I feel like they should be called “Units of Deliciousness” instead. Anyway, when I got to the store, everything in the dairy aisle was completely full… except the butter. There was one block of unsalted butter left, but come on, unsalted butter is like non-alcoholic beer. What’s the point? I went to another grocery store, because the possibility of mom being able to make cookies was worth the Coronavirus risk of another shopping trip. All the cold cases were full… except the butter. Maybe all of those folks that bought out all the popcorn had an epiphany.

To wrap up this pointless observational time killer, I have made a list of my own personal Nonessential-Essential COVID supplies. Over the years, I’ve stocked up on a few things in case this day would ever come. I have a pact with some of my friends that if the zombie apocalypse comes, they can come live in my commune, with the understanding that they have a skill that is useful. There are a lot of folks I know that will be in for a rude awakening when I can’t use their Doctorate in Early Mesopotamian Pottery skill set in my commune to shoot intruders, plant gardens, or build pens for the livestock.

Guns and ammo: These can be used to hunt with, defend my property with, and more importantly, to threaten toilet paper hoarders and take their toilet paper from them. See, that’s why I didn’t join the mobs at Costco. I’m glad you fought for that 68 pack of Charmin and brought it home so I can take it from you at gunpoint.
Army MREs: For you civilians, this stands for “Meals Ready to Eat.” That is a loose interpretation, because what they really mean is, “Meals that are ready to eat, but will make you want to learn how to forage for food instead.” It’s not that they are completely lacking charm, it’s more about the intestinal and gastric distress that you will likely experience within 24 hours from consuming them. Good thing I have those guns. We will need the toilet paper.
Whiskey: So if there was any real point to be taken away from this pandemic, it’s about the importance of good whiskey. Thats all I’m really trying to say. Whiskey is great. While everyone was out fighting strangers for popcorn, I was silently buying bottles of whiskey. I wasn’t really worried about the supply chain, so why was I buying it? Fourth grade math. My new COVID part-time job has been as math tutor to a 4th grader. And for the life of me, I don’t understand how her teachers can get through a school day without bourbon.

Happy Hoarding, Weirdos.