The Eye of Kris

You know, sometimes I think it's my job to teach people about customer service.

For the last month or so, we have been trying to get an A/C duct run into a room at our house. The room used to be a single-car garage, but we had it finished out last year. I've been running a window-unit for A/C in the summer, and a space heater in the winter, but I decided we might as well get the central heat and air hooked up.

Mary called a local company and got a guy to come out and look at it, and give us a quote. He told us that it's not a difficult or expensive job, and shouldn't take very long (less than half a day) to do. Great.

We waited a little while, and then decided we'd like to get it done. Suddenly, this guy became very busy, and kept putting us off. "Call me back at the beginning of the month". "I'll put you on the schedule for the first of next week". "I've got one more job to finish, then I can come do yours". Most of the time, though, we would just get his voice mail, which was often full and "could not accept any more messages". I wonder why...

Finally, yesterday, he told us he would come to our house "in the morning" (unable to give a specific time, though). I was already pretty fed up with this guy, but hadn't done much about it, mostly out of lack of time and the desire to get the thing done and not start the process over with someone new.

So, I worked from home this morning, just so that I could be available in case anything needed to be moved or covered while he worked (the duct was to go near my computer equipment). But did Mr. A/C man show up? Nope. Did he call to tell us that he would not be able to make it? Nope. Did he give me any reason or desire to do business with him? Nope.

I called another company and talked to a very friendly man who gave me a quote on the phone and made an appointment to come out and do the job tomorrow. Then I called the original guy, who did not answer his phone (as usual), and left a message to inform him we had found someone else to do the job and his services would not be necessary. I was even very nice about it. Really.

I don't understand how people can run a business that way. I understand that this guy is probably very busy, with more work than he can handle in the summer months. It seems he's found a way to fix that problem, though...