We had a very wealthy, cheap client who had to be in control of everyone and everything (and this was not in the smart home context). There were bits and pieces of A/V stuff scattered about. None of the rooms was quite right from a design and implementation standpoint and it seemed like each budget had been squeezed a bit more than it should have been. At first I blamed this on the installer (someone who I did not respect) not properly qualifying the customer, but after a while it became clear that the customer was too cheap to do things right and would not use some simple workarounds because "I shouldn't need to do that". Oh, and don't let me forget to mention that we bumped into a mechanical engineering company on site that was diagnosing a few little major issues with the air conditioning system that wasn't quite right.

We recommended replacing a few things and installing a more capable remote, but "I bought good equipment, and I should not need to do that." Eventually, we fired each other. A few weeks later we got a call from another dealer who had been working with this guy. Evidentially, he had been bad mouthing us. We and the other dealer respected each other and they had come to exactly the same diagnosis and recommendation as we had. I assume that they walked because ... A few weeks later we got a call from yet another dealer. It was almost the same script, except that this unfortunate dealer had installed some stuff and had not been paid.