Hot under the collar
“You don’t want to come down here. We’ve had a bit of a problem.”
These are the words that drifted up from our basement one year ago and set into motion the fateful Thing Of Which We Do Not Speak (or TOWWDNS) in our home. I have referenced the incident in this column a couple times, but have not elaborated because a) it is the TOWWDNS (what part of Do Not Speak Do You Not Get?), and b) it was just too traumatic to revisit until now. However, because Columbus Day marked the passing of one year, I feel it’s time to clear the air around here before we turn up the thermostat and the awful memory comes seeping once again through the baseboards.
TOWWDNS is, simply put, a botched furnace installation. But wait. “Botched” is such a gentle word. It implies “Oopsie!” when what we got was full-blown SNAFU, minus the “Situation Normal” part. And the worst of it was, I thought I had made the right choice in selecting our good old dependable local oil company – Whose Name I Shall Not Speak Here – to do the job.
It started with the estimate. As I have explained before, the art of the estimate involves the old bait-and-switch technique of sending Reliable Man (RM) over to lull you into a state of false security that Everything Will Be OK (EWBOK). RMs look like the guy in the CMP ads – head: capable of holding up a hard hat; hips: tool-belt ready; boots: steel-toed. He pulls up in his giant and (now that I think of it) suspiciously shiny pickup and surveys your a) rotten back porch, b) leaky roof, c) 60-amp, knob-and-tube wiring or d) ancient furnace with an EWBOK air of “I’ve seen worse” and “I’ll take care of it, ma’am.”
And you know what? You believe him. You believe him because he looks like a good Maine man who knows how to use his hands and get a job done. And he doesn’t look like the guy who showed up wearing business clothes, clicked away with his digital camera and said “I’ll have to run these numbers back at the office,” or the one with black cracked hands who told you he couldn’t give you an estimate since he didn’t know how long the job would take.
So you sign the contract. You sign away because you want to believe. You want to believe that all shysters wear gold chains and pinky rings, not Carhartts and flannel shirts. You sign, because you picture RM showing up with an entire crew of RMs, and, even though you don’t bake, you picture yourself with a tray of homemade donuts and a percolator full of coffee, working the site like a Red Cross nurse.
Except what we got was the B Team. No, that’s an insult to B Teams everywhere. How about the P Team? Or better yet, the Z Team? How about the Z Team to the negative tenth power? (OK, I’m already getting a little steamed. I’ll try to avoid the sarcasm.)
I didn’t know the B Team was lurking in my basement at first. That’s because I went to the gym on the morning of the installation and left John to let them in before leaving for the office, so they could work without me spying on them. (It’s extremely difficult to have something major going on in one’s home and not want to watch.) When I returned and stood at the head of the basement stairs, calling down in my best USO voice, “Yoo-hoo… Reliable Men. I’m home,” I expected a hearty chorus of “Howdy, ma’am”s, not the words that started TOWWDNS.
What ensued was a series of blunders, screw-ups and just plain and utter incompetence. First, there was the mess: They spilled soot taking out the old furnace and subsequently tracked it through the entire house as they attempted to switch us from one heating zone to two. (Apparently they felt no need to bother with those cute little booties most furnacemen wear in people’s living quarters.) The soot also found its way onto their hands, and they managed to touch almost every white, off-white, ecru and beige surface in our home. They never closed the basement door, which opens into the kitchen, when all this happened (“Let’s get a little air moving down here!”), so there was black soot on every dish and plate and pot we owned. There was no attempt to clean up any of the sawdust or insulation or shavings or dripped oil they left in their wake, which was considerable.
But it was not the mess OWWDNS. Nor was it the damage: the two, foot-long gouges in our newly refinished, maple living room floor, where a couch had obviously been shoved, rather than lifted, out of the way; a bashed-in door frame and cracked walkway, where I can only assume they tried to take the new furnace in sideways and then dropped it while they figured out their next brilliant plan; the trashed basement floor. Or the fact that the Moron In Charge Of The Wrench failed to tighten the oil lines, so that when the Team finally left and I was able to go downstairs that night and examine their handiwork, I found a pool of oil encircling the furnace and a steady drip from the lines. And what did the MICOTW say when we called the company’s after-hours hotline and got him to come back? “Huh, I can fix that.” That I did not go for this man’s neck still stands to me as a pinnacle of self-restraint.
And it’s not even the fact it took repeated visits and retooling and replumbing to get the thing running properly (which, I am convinced, it still does not do). No, it’s none of these things. It is the fact we dealt directly with the president of our good old dependable local oil company – Whose Name I Still Shall Not Speak Here (although I am so very tempted) – and he could not have been ruder, surlier or more apathetic. It took us over four months of letter-writing and calling and showing up on his doorstep to get this thing resolved. In the end, their insurance paid us $1,600 in damages, and we finally settled the bill. But even after all that, the jerk (this is not the name we used around our house) never once said he was sorry – until the very end. That was after I had pounded his desk with the flat of my hand (even though I promised John I would let cooler heads prevail and let him do the talking), demanding to know if he was proud: “Are you proud of the job your workers did? Do you really want people as unhappy as we are out on the streets of Portland?” And when that parting “sorry” came, it was so thin, so anemic, so disingenuous, so after-the-fact, so (breathe, Peavey, breathe)…
OK, so maybe a year hasn’t been long enough. That’s because the TOWWDNS rattled our faith. And I’ll tell you something: no amount of time can ever make us feel EWBOK again.
Elizabeth Peavey cautions all business owners to treat every customer as though she might be a vindictive columnist. Or to at least do the right thing.
