Admit it! or What Have You Done with Bad Customers?

[MacPaint]

We have all had a really, truly nasty customer -- one who could not be pleased no matter what you did to apease them, or maybe just a jerk or poor payer who didn't appreciate your craftmanship?
And some of us may have done some things that are, well... a bit on the unconventional side of professionalism.

If you dare....
Share your stories with your fellow tradesmen. Come on...you must have a great story that you're just dying to tell!

This is a true story.
We were restaining an exterior of the main house on a very nice estate owned by a wealthy couple with grown kids. When we started the job, one of my crew members asked the owner if he could use the bathroom. The man declined to give him permission.
"How about the bathroom in your pool house?" he asked.
The homeowner still declined.
"Go down the road to the general store," he said, "they have a bathroom you can use."
It turned out that the "store" was 5 miles away!

As the job progressed, my crew members complained almost daily about how they were being treated by the homeowner.
At the end of the job, as we were driving away, one of my workers admitted that NONE of them had ever made the 5-mile trip to the bathroom at the general store, Instead, they used their stain pails and applied the "special mix" to the entire house!!!
 
While I do not, and did not, condone this behavior, I couldn't help but laugh.

I have another tale, but I'll let others (who are brave enough) chime in with their stories.

Mac

[MacPaint]

Hmmmmm....nobody has ever done anything funny or off-the-wall at a paint job?

OK...I'll add another.
This is not my story, but a fellow contractor swears he did this.

He was painting a living room for a well-to-do lady and was just about finished with the room. He was moving fast and had the tunes cranked on the woman's home entertainment system.
As he was painting a window, he saw the woman coming up her long driveway in her car, so he turned quickly to run over and turn-down the stereo - as I mentioned, he had it up very loud. In doing so, he kicked over an almost-full gallon of trim paint onto the floor!

Thinking quickly, he ran into the family room and grabbed the family's sleeping cat. Then he dropped the cat gently into the spilled paint and let 'er go! The cat ran off, leaving a trail of painty paw tracks. As the lady entered the house she was aghast!
There he was, on his hands and knees, cleaning-up the spilled mess.
My friend apologized.
"I should have kept the paint covered. I'm sorry, but the cat knocked it off the coffee table when she was rubbing against it."

The lady ran off and scolded the cat and cleaned its paws. Later, she apologized to my friend and offered to lock the cat in the basement. My friend shrugged it off.
"I like your cat. She keeps me company. I'll just be careful not to leave the paint where she can get at it."

Too funny.

[Sandycane]

Having 6 house cats, myself, I never would have bought that story! Although, one time one of mine steped on the lid of a can and tracked a few paw prints on the floor.
The first thing I would have asked is, 'What was the paint can doing on the coffee table in the first place??!!'

[hayseed]

We did a kitchen remodel for a good friend's mother.  For the first two weeks of the job, she thought I was a saint.  She even sent out a mailer to all of the houses in her neighborhood to tell them about the job that we were doing at her house, and please come look, and all that.  Pretty cool, huh?

Then we started to fall behind schedule.  Then one of my guys (all 280 pounds of him) fell through her living room ceiling while installing can lights.  She transformed into the nastiest person that I have ever dealt with.

One day I was walking through the house with my voltage detector.  It beeps every timed you press the activator button, and you can't really see your thumb move when you press it.  I was about 15 feet from her and started slowly pressing the button.  As I moved closer, I pressed faster and faster until I was three feet away and it was beeping like crazy.

"What is that thing!" she demanded.

With my best smile, I said, "It's a !!!! detector."

She busted out laughing and our relationship lightened up for a few days, until the next problem came along....

[Fat Tony]

Although this isnt a bad customer story, it did happen to my cousin who has told the story countless times. It seems he and his partner were doing an interior, my cousin was in the bathroom and his partner was in the hallway and they were talking back and forth. My cousin was climbing a stepladder with full bucket in hand and lo and behold the bucket slipped right out of his hands and boom, all over the floor which was covered and the bathroom cabinets , which were not covered. The first words out of his mouth were not : Wow, doesnt this look neat !!!  They were more along the lines of #$#@&^$%^**&&^%^. Im sure you get the idea.
Anyway, just as they were begining to clean up, the home owner stopped in and looked with wide eyes and open mouth.
My cousin never missed a beat, he look at the man and said : Paul, dont worry about a thing, theres no extra charge for this !!
The man looked at him and his partner, laughed and walked away. Took them about three hours to get the mess cleaned. The guy was real good about it, id say. lol

[Artisan J]

This is a story that trumps all stories. Indeed, the greatest paint story ever told!!!

One day, not too long ago, I was painting with three of my fellow workers. We were doing two coats of interior sw ever clean flat paint latex yellow to the walls on the entire house. The homeowner was nine months pregnant at the time, about to pop. The way the house was set up, was everything in the house was open. Foyer, kitchen, eat in, dining room, and upper loft were all open. The foyer had two plant ledges that we were working on to cut in the upper wall section. The plant ledge had ended and we had to use the 20 ft ladder to reach the walls. My buddy, Randy, was rolling out of the five gallon bucket to save time and had the five gallon about three quarter full on the plant ledge. I was on the ground cutting the floor/baseboard area. I looked up, and saw him stepping onto the ladder from the plant ledge. As he stepped onto the ladder, he was moving the five gallon bucket from the plant ledge to his right hand ( behind the back type move with the five gallon bucket.) As he was moving it, my fellow worker, Audrey, walked right underneath the ladder, just in time to avoid catastrophe. The five gallon bucket, filled with yellow paint fell astonishingly fast to the ground and spilled everywhere! To trump it all, it splashed into the kitchen, all over the nine months pregnant homeowner who just so happened to be home that day to be making a peanut butter and paint sandwich.!!! She demanded us to leave asap, after cleaning up the paint. I was surprised that she did not have the baby right there!!!
: )

[Tallman]

More often than I like we end up staying late/early to get a mill pack primed or topcoated (we shoot all our millwork).  We turn the heat way up in the house before we shoot to keep the paint from running so it's always like 90 degrees in the house. 

One day at about 1am my partner started shooting upstairs and decided to play a joke on a couple of our new employees.  He beeped me on my phone and told me to, "send the boys up to help".  When they got up there he was wearing nothing but his boots and resperator shooting away! 

[Lynjowoman]

Hope there were no women on the crew !     


Lynjo

[Paint Mode]

Hope there were no women on the crew !     

Women can paint?   


 
   We did an old mans house that had the kitchen extended into what was the old laundry room, which still had 4 inches of pipe coming out of the wall in the new dining room. This old man was getting picky as s**t with my old boss, and finally my boss says, "Let me ask you something. What's gonna look worse, the small drywall imperfection, or the pipes hangin out of the wall!!"  hahah. It was great.

   Another guy moved out of his beach house to have the WHOLE place redone. Towards the end, the guy thought he was just gonna be a s**t head and he wouldn't have to pay, or get a discount, or whatever he was thinking. We tried to fix little stuff, but he just kept going with imaginary problems. My old boss finally told him, "Either you can pay me all of what you owe right now, or I'll have the city come rip all 125 can lights out of your house for you, because you don't have a permit."  And then we got payed. lol.

   Not a customer, but the above house had no plumbing the whole time we were there. One of the mexicans went out back and lined a 5 gal bucket with plastic and unloaded. Wrapped it up with tape, walked in the back door and says "hey!". One of our guys turns around, and he tosses it to him like "catch this". A stunned look, and then the question was, "why is this warm".

[Lynjowoman]

Paint Mode

I've always been told women make the best painters. Watch out there are several women painters on this forum. 

Lynjo

No I'm not offended.

[Innovative]

This one time we did work for the most cheap, evil, and inconsiderate couple in the world. Everyday it was something new they wanted done for free. I ended up making out good for the last little job we did. It was to replace old ceiling tiles in a drop ceiling, about 100 of them. I charged them $425 not counting material (took us 4 hours). The a***** also had enough nerve to try to get me to take off $15 bucks because he installed 6 of them himself. Anyway, removing one of the tiles my buddy and I found a dead mouse. These people were "cheaply" fixing up the place cause they were moving, so in the process we threw the little guy along with their luggage in the basement. I hope they were pissed. They were lucky I didn't do anything worse because I had a lot of ideas! More stories to come . .

[Jared]

This is a great thread. 

Not only am I getting a good laugh every once in a while, but I have also learned who *NOT* to hire. 

[Lynjowoman]

Amen   

Lynjo

[loumiron]

I have to admit that I love this thread. Misery loves company.
Just joined the board, Hello to all.
Last August I took on a job from Satan and his Mistress.
The job was an older cape home, grown over with foilage, inside a locked, fenced in yard. It had been many, many years since it had been coated. The paint was literally falling off in places. When I went to do the proposal I was leery. Number one these folks were locked inside this compound, maybe three acres all together. The house was in terrible shape. They met me at the gate and let me in. They were immigrants from Finland. The man could barely speak English, his wife did most of the talking. I was thinking, this is so bad I gotta run. Anyway, they took me into the home and , WOW! it was a complete reversal of the outside. Beautiful furnishings, HUGE carved woodwork, Mantles, very well kept up. So I decided to take it. I wanted to cob the house, they said no. I then told them that I could scrape it down fairly smooth but that it would still show scrape marks. We struck a deal and I was on my way. This particular jobsite was about 2 hours from where I live in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan so I rented a small vacation cottage for a week and took the whole family for a little get away.
We scraped the house. Started to prime. The old boy came out and started to gesture and speak in Finnish. They old girl came out and after a few minutes explained to me that the siding was not smooth enough. Oh God, I thought. What have I done! I ended up SANDING THE ENTIRE HOUSE! I was quickly eating away my downpayment. It was in mid August, the temps were hovering at 100 and the boys were pissed. I was just about ready to start priming again and the old boy comes out with a torch and starts to peel the paint from the front entry portico. Now he says he wants that stained. Oh God. I go and get the boys to prime the west wall. We leave for the day. Next morning he meets me at the compound gate. He now explains to me through the Mistress that he wants TWO coats of primer and a color change. They threatened to sue me if I didn't do what they wanted. That was it, I packed up and left. I figure I lost at least 2 grand on this deal.

[Lynjowoman]

Sounds like trouble.You probably would have lost a lot more it you stayed.

Welcome to our forum.

Lynjo