Here is a good one that just happened.

I received a voicemail from a guy that got our info from the TV repair facility we have a relationship with. He says he has a Speakercraft MZC66 with no volume. Leaves me his name in the message, Roy, and asks for a return call to discuss.

So I call and ask to speak with Roy. He said no, he is not in. I said ok, this is Mike returning his call regarding the audio system.

So he now says, "Oh, yeah, ok. I was, uh, here when he was dealing with that. I can help you."

When I inform him that this may turn out to be a situation where the system has to be replaced after come troubleshooting, he starts asking about pricing (for the system that is not his)

So I got the address, and set an appointment for Friday and asked him his name. He replied with "uhhhhhhhh, Joe".

How stupid do these people think we are? Just admit you thought it was a cold call or something and pretending to not be available. :rolleyes:

We have a customer that owns several car dealerships. We install a whole house audio system for him. Don't hear from him for a few years and calls and tells us the system has never worked and wants us to come out to check it out. Get there and he again repeats that the system has never worked right and is this covered under warranty since "its never worked right".

I wonder what would happen if I brought my car into one of his dealership two years after it is out of warranty and say that they should fix it free because "its never worked right".

I worked with someone who use to work as a mechanic at a Volkswagen dealership. An elder man brought his car in for the dome light fuse blowing up upon door opening. It was out of warranty, but of course the man wants it fixed. And since he was elder, he rarely drove at night and it had less than 15k after 4 years.

Long story short, they removed the door panels, dashboard then finally the ceiling cover. Despite it being out of warranty, it was 100% covered due to a note. "How long did it take you to find this a-hole?" With a wire from the light and it's screw to ground. Subsequently someone on the assembly line got fired too.

KOT

We need a usage timer like projectors have that we can show a client. "never worked right? Someone has been using it at least 4 hours a day since installation"

Why? It's way more fun to say, "well then you probably should have called me earlier, huh?"

DING DING DING! WINNER!!!!!!!!!! And EXACTLY right. Life is to short to chase a dollar thats not worth a dollar. And congratulations on getting rids of liberals in your life. (joking!!! :) )

After 10 minutes with a client I know whether or not I'm going to take the job regardless of how much money is in it. I'm the same age as Homeboy and I only work with people I like. Life is way too short to deal with a**holes.

+1000

Mac said it first, but what the hell:

He'd look at the odometer and say "well, something works right!" We need hidden time meters in our equipment so we can say "well, you've got a hell of a lot more patience than I have, since you've run your system for 4200 hours when it never worked!"

This next one simply isn't possible. It starts with opening the door and has flaws beyond that:

Uhhhhh... dome lights come on when the door is opened, not just when the door is opened at night. It would have blown before the first owner did a test drive or drove it off the lot. The dealer would not have let that go.

A wire from the light to ground would not blow anything. A wire from the hot lead to ground would blow the fuse, but it would have been noticed long before the car was sold.

Further, how would the dealership have such a long reach that they could get one particular worker fired at a plant presumably in Germany (but maybe in Mexico?) whose English was good enough to write a note using the term "a-hole"; who still was working there four years later; and who could be exactly identified?

I say urban myth. Good one, but a myth anyway.

Not all cars allow their dome lights to turn on whenever a door is opened at any time. Great example is my 2006 Cadillac CTS, sure it's a Cadillac, but it does sense daylight. Thus my dome lights do not turn on when out in sun light. I'm pretty sure other GM cars that has automatic headlights, which I'm sure they all do now, have the sense not to turn on the dome lights during the daylight.

As for the person being fired... Well think about this. Every car has a VIN. So they are able to go as far back as they need to to determine who built the car that particular day. Or what parts were used and what not. Why do you think, when there's a recall, that not all cars of that year/make/model are put under that recall. Simply because each lot of parts are tracked.

As for someone writing in English form a foreign country... How small of a thought that is from you.

The wire from the light... Did I state which wire it was, was it the hot wire, was it the ground wire? No I did not state what wire it was. Simply because I figured that those who would read it from this forum has the smarts that it was a wire that would short out to ground. But apparently some do not.

KOT

Same here.

The first car my older bro bought ($60) had no done lamp. Figuring it just burned out, he bought a new lamp at the auto parts store.

Once installed, any door opened caused the windshield wipers to start running.

That's called automation! Look closely at the window sticker. That was an overpriced option. :)

I would bet that it had been worked on by someone who neglected to make/remake a connection when they worked on it. What make/model- do you remember?

I was visiting friends in PHX- a friend who had replaced the engine in a truck owned by his future father-in-law's company had noticed some problems afterward. The lights would stop working when the clutch was used and when th wipers were used, the horn would honk. Since he hadn't done anything to the wiring for these accessories and none of the wiring was pinched, it was baffling. He has serviced vehicles for decades and has extensive training, I had done 12V electrical installations for ten years and the other guy was an electrical service tech, so it should have been easy enough to find, right? It was decided that we needed to lok for a broken wire, so I headed into the building for a spool of some kind of wire to use as a jumper- anything larger than 14Ga would have worked safely. As I returned, one of them was in the driver's seat while the other looked under the hood and checking for anything that could cause this weirdness and when I heard the horn, I looked up to see that as he engaged the clutch, the truck's cab would rise and when he took his foot off, the cab lowered. Being a heavy duty truck, the clutch had a strong spring, so it took a bit of effort and it was strong enough to exert a lot of force on anything associated with the linkage. Like the cab. Which had some underbody rust from its time spent in places where snow and salted roads were common.

Turns out, salt and time had caused the area around one of the body bolts to disintegrate and since the accessories are all grounded to the body and the battery had originally been grounded to the frame, lifting the cab affected the return path and made life a bit interesting. It also didn't have a connection directly to the body, so I made a jumper to connect this and the problems ended.

There are good customers and bad customers. You want to make the bad customers someone else's customer.