GETTING WHAT YOU PAY FOR

Doom and Madness In The Service Industry

By

Jimmy Joe Meeker

First Published in The Wilson County Advocate, Vol. 5, No. 29, ©August 10, 1993 by Donald W. Gillette

We don’t expect service in this country anymore. Anytime we buy something, we expect to be mistreated, taken for granted, or ignored. People in the service industry walk all over consumers and we just smile and pay the bills. On the rare occasion we run across a company that actually cares about our business we’re so overjoyed that we forget about the times we’ve been lied to or bamboozled by folks who think they’re doing us a favor by taking our money.

In my case, it started with the plumber.

I had a leak under the sink, so I called the plumber to replace my kitchen faucet.

"I’ll be there Tuesday morning at 9:00 AM," he said. And I believed him.

So, on Monday afternoon, I told my secretary that I’d be a little late tomorrow. The plumber was coming. I didn’t know then that in Plumber Talk, 9:00 AM means noon and Tuesday could mean either Wednesday or Friday. Saturday means Thursday. There is no word for Monday.

It was pleasant to be able to sleep an hour longer than usual on Tuesday morning, but I could have slept straight through until Wednesday morning because that’s when the plumber finally knocked on the door.

"Got tied up yesterday," he said with a pained look on his face. "My help didn’t show up."

I directed him to the sink, then stood back and watched while he contorted like a circus freak and wedged himself into the cabinet. "Man, I hate these things," he said, grunting with every twist of his wrench.

Somewhere inside my head a voice started screaming, "You’re a plumber! Didn’t you know you’d be installing faucets when you painted ‘Plumber’ on the side of that van out there leaking oil all over my driveway? If you hate being under a sink, then crawling around under a house must send you straight for the Suicide Hot Line."

Anyway, after about 15 minutes, he announced that he had to go buy a washer.

"You don’t have any washers in that van?" I asked.

"Wrong sizes," he said, and left.

Two hours later he returned with a 15¢ washer and finished the job. The $198.50 bill included the two hours he was gone (he wrote that up as "travel time") plus $1.50 for the washer. What could I do? I wrote him a check.

A week later, the faucet started sliding around like it was on ball bearings. I found a pair of pliers under the couch and fixed it myself.

Did I call the plumber and demand he fix his shoddy job? Nope. I didn’t want to waste another two days.

Next, it was the roofers. After 20 something years, the old cabin’s roof was beginning to look like a close-up of Tommy Lee Jones’ cheeks so I called a roofing contractor for an estimate. Roofing contractors don’t operate on plumber time, so he showed up when he was supposed to and gave me an estimate that sounded good. It’s a small place--$2,000. When I asked him how long it’d take to finish the job, he said, "Day, day-and-a-half, two days…" After hearing that, I figured estimates weren’t really his strong point, so I wanted to know if the $2,000 he quoted really meant "$2,000" or did it mean "$2,000, $3,000, $4,000…"

The roofers would start on Thursday.

While roofing contractors may not operate on plumber time, roofers themselves do. When I got home from work on Thursday, the only thing new at the Meeker hacienda was a dead sparrow Maxwell had left on the front porch.

I hate that cat. I’d kill him if I thought he wasn’t already one of the undead.

Friday morning at 6:00 AM I was jolted awake by a horrible scratching noise. The cat tormenting me again, I figured, so I shouted, "Hey! What’re you doing, you flea-bitten dirtbag?"

And a voice from outside answered, "Takin’ off the old roof."

I got home Friday afternoon and noticed there was no felt paper under an eight-foot length of new shingles, so I called the contractor. "Couldn’t reach it," the guy told me. "He’ll do it tomorrow."

Saturday morning, 6:00 AM. More pounding outside. Good, I thought, at least they’ll have it finished today. I went outside and pointed out the missing felt paper. "You don’t need it," the guy said, "but I can put some on there if you want." Considering the only thing between the elements and me is felt paper and a row of shingles, I did want.

An hour and a half later, the roofer’s were packing up. The foreman’s daughter was getting married at noon. "We’ll be back Monday to finish it up."

So, the "Day, day-and-a-half, two days" job that was supposed to start on Thursday but started on Friday was fast becoming a job that would hopefully be completed sometime before the Millennium.

Forget it, I thought, go get the oil changed in the car.

So I drove into town around noon and paid for the Deluxe Oil Change/Inspection Package. The attendant asked me to turn my wheels to the left so he could check my air cleaner, but he never did. He also didn't check my tire pressure, battery, coolant level, or transmission fluid. He did, however, wash my windshield. Twice.

When this place first opened, everyone was in a uniform, employees called each other "Sir", and there was a checklist they followed before a vehicle left the building. It was an impressive operation. Not anymore. Half of them wear uniforms and half of them look like they get dragged around by a truck for a couple of hours before they show up to work in a T shirt. And evidently they quit using their checklist or the guy who waited on me would have saved himself the effort of that second windshield wash.

But I didn’t complain. I was so grateful he put oil back into my engine I almost kissed him.

On the way home, I stopped at the new McDonald’s in Leeville and ordered two cheeseburgers and a drink at the Drive-Thru window. McDonald’s is so efficient they don’t even have the time to spell out "through." What could go wrong here? Five minutes later, driving home, I found out. No burger. I bit into a bun, cheese, ketchup, mustard, and a couple of slices of pickle. Not a cow in sight.

Something snapped.

I spun that Lincoln around like it was the Batmobile.

When I finally calmed down enough to get somebody to understand me, the manager came up to counter. I pitched him the bag with instructions to "Check out those cheeseburgers."

"What’s wrong with them?" he asked.

I was approaching stroke territory. Out with the bad air, in with the good. "Just check ‘em out!" I demanded.

But he was persistent. "What’s wrong with them?"

I held my impulse to lunge across the counter. "There’s…nothing…on…them," I managed to say.

He looked at me as if I was insane. "Lots of people get them like that," he said.

I started to faint, but an old lady brought me around with a jab to the kidneys that would have killed a lesser man. "People order cheeseburgers without the burger?" I asked, amazed.

The manager squinted at me suspiciously and tore the bag open. Then he streaked around the corner and nabbed some high school kid. The kid had this sheepish grin on his face that led me to believe he’d omitted the meat on purpose. Then I remembered my high school job as a sacker at Kroger and a certain incident involving some bananas, so I started grinning, too. But I got my two cheeseburgers. And a free apple pie I gave to the cat that kept him sick for two days.

Justice at last.

Which is what we should all be demanding. When we pay for something, we have the right to get exactly what we pay for and when somebody tells us they’re going to do something, we have the right to expect them to do it and do it right. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a 12 year old boy cutting your grass for $15 or a slick BMW salesman trying to get you to sign your first born child away for the right to drive a German car with the same legroom as Malibu Barbie’s Corvette.

It’s a sad commentary on America that we have to start a fight in order to get the goods and services we pay for, but the more we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of, the easier it gets for businesses to do it.

So from now on, I’m not paying for anything that’s not right. Except a meal in a restaurant. You don’t want to make a habit of sending food back. Those folks can be vindictive.

No one here gets out alive.

XXX