Clueless

Pete Philipps

— “How America does business” is an all-too-often mantra in our house.

The most recent instance involved the installation of stair rails, as advised by the occupational therapist working with my wife, Evelyn, after she suffered injuries from a fall. She gave us the name of someone with whom she works frequently and we wasted no time before calling him. 

Ralph (not his real name) arrived promptly and took measurements, which he wrote on the back of his estimate. When I asked him for the estimate he said he needed it for the  measurements he’d written on the back. Not too many days later he returned carrying a railing. The only problem: it was for someone else’s house. He apologized and returned a few days later with the correct railing. He installed it in less time than it has taken me to write this. Small wonder, as I soon discovered. He had drilled six to eight incorrect holes and left without giving us a chance to inspect his work and, no surprise here, without patching the holes. Nor was the railing sanded as smoothly as it should have been.

It wasn’t until after Ralph made his quick getaway that I realized he hadn’t left me an invoice, which would serve as my receipt. I called him and left a message but got no response. A day or two later I called him again. This time he answered, and when I asked him to send me a receipt he replied, “You got it.” I took this as his way of saying he would mail it ASAP.

But I was mistaken.

After waiting patiently for a few days, we emailed Ralph as follows:

Hello Ralph.

In going through our records we discovered that we do not have a receipt for the stair railing. Please email it to us. Here we added our email address.

A few hours later we received the following response:

I do not save invoices and have no clue what you hot (sic) or how much you paid.

We know exactly what we got and how much we paid: too much.

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