The Daughter had a school exercise in one of her classes to write a letter of complaint or protest. It did not have to be a real situation, but there was extra credit, with bonus points for mailing it.
As it turned out, she had a pretty good example. I have mentioned/complained in these pages about the shoddy work done by the roofer/contractor that our next door neighbor hired. As the Daughter noted, the Dumpster being used was halfway across our lawn. When the workers left, there was still much roofing on the shared walkway between our two properties.” And so on.
What made me grimace and laugh was when she noted that her “elderly” father used that sidewwalk often. In fact, I do, but she was really milking it.
In anticipation of writing the letter, she looked up in Google Maps reviews of the offending companies. There were five 5-star reviews! But one of them was a RESPONSE by the owner of the company to a 1-star review, one of nine. And no rankings in between.
One bad review wrote about lateness and not contacting the client, false promises about the work being completed quickly. “When I hadn’t heard from anyone within the time frame, I called the company to get an update… The woman I spoke with when I called initially told me she would have no way of knowing this…” Bottom line: she was strung around for months with a dearth of info.
Suddenly, one day, “two workers showed up at my door to do the deck work. This had not been scheduled at all with me…” They DID do good work that day. She had similar problems with her gutters, seven apointments, and evasive management, before the work was done
Another: “I was lied to from the start… They took their money, removed my siding and came back about 2 weeks to start the work, ordered wrong size windows, started working on the bathroom and from the start nothing went right…
Another: If I could give this company zero stars I would, but unfortunately it isn’t an option. The… real [reviews] are the ones that come with severe negative aspects first because it sounds pretty accurate to my experience.
Another: Worst contractors I’ve ever dealt with…. We asked them to let us know when the dumpster would be dropped off so we could move cars out of the way, they did not. It got dropped off and blocked one of our cars in the driveway…
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Another: Owner talked rude and offensive to other races. Totally unprofessional. They maybe cheap, but you get what you paid.
Another: They ran the downspouts of the gutters right across our sidewalk (tripping hazard) and into the neighbors yard. During the first week, they used the neighbors yard as a prep area, and would leave garbage all over when they left for the day… They smoked marijuana right outside my back door while my 9 month old daughter was in the house. They screamed F-bombs at each other right outside her bedroom window. The owner… also lied to our faces numerous times during this ordeal, and refused to admit when he had been caught in his own web of lies. The job was quoted as a one week project, and after a month they had not finished cleaning up, so we had to hire someone else to do it.
We found out that our next-door neighbor is attempting to sue the contractor. The Daughter pointed out the online reviews to him, optimally to use to bolster his claim of the contractor’s incompetence.