socallly said:
I just got back from meeting with the framer I agreed to pay him the extra thousand after he straight edges everything.I started feeling like the bad guy after reading some of the posts on the board.The main goal was to make him and I happy and I feel that has been accomplished now.Thanks again
Please don't feel like a bad guy. You've never given me that impression. What you've done is got yourself caught in a bind all of us do on occasion. Just yesterday I had a misunderstanding with a long time friend. He thought I was going to show up early and I hadn't thought I'd made a committment like that. By the time I got there he'd worked himself into a tizzy. So he expressed how a tizzy felt in detail.
He felt he was owed more work as compensation for some stuff he'd done for me. He gave me a brief breakdown on the balance sheet as he saw it. I was hurt for a minute. He'd written off about fifteen hundred dollars worth of my labor as a minimal contribution. I bit the bullet and got after it because as we know tizziness is dizziness with a bite.
We're men so we don't do much apologizing or explaning like women folks do. We get after it and show our feelings and thoughts by deeds. By the end of the day his actions were telling me we were on the same page. Even though the conversation was never brought up his actions showed he knew he'd over reacted was not proud of it.
One of the advantages of long term friendships is sometime we love our friends not only with their faults, but because of them. I'm a truly blessed man. I have many faults and many friends. I'm afraid at this late date to change much for fear of losing the balance.
In this instance I had two other friends of mine jump in and bailed me out bigtime. We treated the project like it was nothing but a thing. When it was done I tried to compensate them for their efforts and they wouldn't hear none of it. It seems their balance sheets were as distorted as friend number one.
Us guys in the trades find the swapping easy and natural. It's an easy currency to work with because we're well aware of the costs of doing our business. The framers know what the weldors get and the weldors have a pretty good idea of what it cost to be in business as a framer. Where it gets tricky is dealing with those whose business models we don't understand. It can be really complicated when working with folks who have a job like in a union or working for a utility etc. Between us trying to minimize our expenses and maximize the appearance of our profits and their perception of everyone in business making money hand over fist. We find them thinking we can work for free and our material cost is ten percent with a ninety percent markup. Like I said, the confusion comes with swapping when the currency isn't understood well by both parties.
Sorry for the ramble. I am glad you worked it out with him. I'm sure he'd have bitten the bullet to keep your friendship and hated bringing up the surcharges. However, I'm sure if you were in his shoes you'd understand that he was in a bind and couldn't afford to be as generous with you as he'd wanted. I'd bet the donut against the hole that it was a lot harder for him to ask than it was for you to hear.
Keep posting the pictures.
That master plumber should have known better than to have the shower heads and screens installed on the faucets the first time he turned on the water.
