Nerd Pride Radio

I tried to avoid starting this thread. Here is a cold, deep truth for you, though: contractors, as a class, suck and are so much worse than telemarketers and car salesmen and lawyers. My kidney is suddenly hurting so bad, completely due to utterly overwhelming stress. Anyway, what's the cause of my stress? The fact that contractors are on the whole shit excuses for functioning human beings, and I loathe nearly every one of them I have ever encountered. They tend to be men who think they know it all, have zero sense of responsibility and courtesy, and due to their weak, selfish, hot-headed, stubborn, Irrational characters and scorn for education and intellect, are incapable of working under other people's authority, which is why they become contractors. Oooooooh I hate all of you fucking varmints even more than I hate the actual varmints in my attic. I hear myself saying all this in full Yosemite Sam tantrum voice so that's how it should be interpreted.

Translation to English: if even one in twenty contractors wasn't such a colossal piece of loser incompetent, I would have zero animals in my house right now, I'd be asleep, and I would maybe have a shot at getting half my work done tomorrow.

And this is a serious question: how do they reproduce? Who would ever have sex with one? And why? I mean, I have highly specific tastes. My husband can fix cars, build large complex structures from wood, devise handy solutions to things, and build and fix computers and entire computer networks, on top of his day job, at which he is astoundingly good. Show me a man with serious car/house/electronics fixing skills, and 80% of his seduction effort is done. So you would think, right, contractors are handy, right? Wrong. They suck. They can't function. They can't maintain even the most basic behavioral norms you would expect. So how do they get laid, ever? I honestly want to know. Would you let someone touch you who can't even show up to put a piece of wood in a hole for large sums of money? What makes anyone think that will suddenly work out anywhere else?

My friend and I have joked about starting on contractor business. We would use the project management skills we have to employ all the time for our current jobs, and apply those to the contracting business: lots of communication with the customers, be on time, be on or under budget. We figured we'd have the market cornered in no time at all, because those are things that most contractors absolutely suck at.

I'm not joking about wanting to do just that. But do you know why it wouldn't work? Because contractors suck so badly. The reason that they do what they do is because they are completely incapable of working for another person. To wit : the ideas of serving the customer or doing anything on time or keeping their word or doing things for the price they say they will without gouging you or doing things in the right way without error are all alien concepts to their very way of being. Nothing against felons per se, but many of them are also ex felons, so good luck getting them to work for you in a way that is helpful and easy. The only ones capable of being employed by another person and who require this sort of organizational assistance are already receiving that organizational assistance from their spouse, which generally goes poorly with respect to customer service because some mixed loyalties are involved there. The others are employed by companies that have to charge exorbitant rates because of the general unreliability and crappiness of most contractors. So either way, the vision of being able to take care of the things the contractors seem incapable of providing while still providing contracting service is impossible unless perhaps you train your children up from a young age to perform these tasks for money. And that is exactly what I am training them to do. Let's just put it this way: my plumber and electrician drive cars that are worth about ten times what my car is worth, and the plumber is actually a responsible and functional person despite charging a lot. The electrician is also a piece of s*** but he is better than the other alternatives and that is the sole reason that I employed him. Any person who does Electrical Plumbing drywall Roofing siding General repairs or almost anything you can think of with respect to working on a house and could do this in a way that was not complete bullshit would be like a nugget of gold in a pile of mica.

Every time contractors get talked about at work, it turns out to be a bad idea.

I also want to lock my upper management in a server rack when they mention it.

I just opened this thread because I was annoyed about a few things and then I realized that out of the three contractors I have tried to hire since I last wrote in this thread, exactly zero of them have shown up to do any work or have done anything that they promised so far. Fuck contractors. I'm so sick of these people.

Anyway, the kitchen towel is not a napkin. How many years do you think it takes to learn such a thing? If a person doesn't want to believe in the truth of the statement then one could go a whole lifetime and never learn it.

If my car is stopped because I need to look at something on my phone then you aren't allowed to be annoyed with me if you would be annoyed with me had I been driving with the phone on. At the same time if my car is harmlessly stopped because I am looking at the phone, you do not have any reason to be mad at me because I'm on the phone. In particular if you're the sort of psychotic who would scream at me to get off my phone when my car is fully in the parked position, I would submit that you had better make sure I don't recognize which one of my neighbors you are at that time. Does it even occur to you that is why I am parked here and not driving? It is legal to park outside your house. It is legal to use the phone when parked. There are serious downsides of living in my neighborhood the most important one being that most of the people are complete entitled jerks.

So, we have a new guy to train...he has seniority on me...no biggie, many people do.

I am not his trainer, but I am the only person that is willing to answer his questions...

I just fed a stray dog, I think...he follows me around asking what I am doing...it's like having a 50 year old Dennis the Menace, and now I empathize with Mr. Wilson.

...shhhh....

Stand back at a safe distance... for at this moment I am DESTROYING THE HOME DEPOT WITH THE POWER OF MY MIND.

Short their stock, people, and buy Lowes or Menards or whatever while you still can. Apparently i have ALREADY destroyed their entire phone system and most of the staff with my brain waves.

One month and three visits later, you still cannot even provide a written estimate, much less a proposed start date. So now the hole in my house left by the idiot before you who just LEFT one day and never was heard from again remains. Fuuuuuuuuck you, contractors. Where can I find one fucking sane functional person who fixes things? Oh wait, I married one, but he works a sixty hour week. Can I pay thousands of dollars cash for a different one? No. Not possible.

I get to find out what I'm paying for, exactly, only after I agree to hire you. Um, no, that's not how it works. Estimate doesn't mean random numeral unattached to a description of work to be performed. Fuuuuuuck.

Meanwhile I have another dude doing a different job for me now. I jump up and get dressed despite being sick today. He shows up whenever he feels like it. As in: not yet!

Maybe he's having coffee with the guys who are supposed to deliver his supplies from Home Depot, who also aren't here yet despite promising to be. After "losing" my order in "the system". My bad, I did in fact destroy their computer system with the electric fire of my hatred coming through the phone line. Jesus tells us to love everyone and I FAIL.

I am annoyed in a whole new way by a whole new person. That is all. I have no outlet for it. I am 1000% right and being right is useless when dealing with the incorrigible, pissy insane.

You said you would deliver my item today. The end of today, at least as you interpret it, is nigh. Yet where is my item? How can work on other things proceed? It cannot. Ha ha, you see my item in your "system" yet it does not say WHERE. Guy, I hate to tell you this, but my mental magic power already fried your system to dust three days ago. You will never use that computer for good again, sir; my tentacles invaded and dismantled it wholly. Just go walk on your two legs, find my item that sits before you, put it on a fucking truck, and drive it here before midnight. If you can.

Others now recognize their bad remarks and apologize. We find the effort Insufficient.

When dealing with a company that has screwed up and does not take responsibility for it, I find it very useful to talk to the highest up person possible. I then like to point out what the error was, and how what I was promised was not what took place. I then call the person who lied to me a liar. They often tend to not like that, and will tell me that they're not liars. I then point out the only other possibility is that they're incompetent. They don't like that either. I then ask them which one they are, a liar or incompetent. When they can't answer that question, I find that my problem has suddenly jumped to the top of their priority list, and all of a sudden I get lots of additional savings.

Contractors: you just keep on producing amazing material for this thread. You people are freaking NUTS. At least this one showed the crazy before I signed the actual contract. Seriously, I will wait eeeeeeeven longer if it means not having to deal with this level of lunatic. Does anyone here want to just come out and visit me and do some home repairs? I will pay so much money and feed and house you; you just kind of have to not have a job. No biggie.

What's the job? School is ending soon, and I am not working on a show this summer. Nebraska (?) can't be that far from NY.

I seriously would hire you if you know how to repair the outer boards of a house and could do it in the next three weeks, but my husband is going to want you to be insured and bonded. If you are, LET ME KNOW. Since our experience with contractors has been so great, the "bonded" part has been actively important in the past.

To the person who stole my credit card information and put a thousand dollars of extra charges on it: **** you. However, thank you for doing it this week and not last week while I was travelling, you're a saint.

OMG! I'm so sorry, that's terrible! However, I feel a smidge better about my own problems in comparison to that nightmare. I was merely coming here to testify that after weeks of attempting to get a clear numeric estimate, the contractors finally began working! They brought a bunch of stuff, made a nice mess, and then never came back, not even for their stuff. Here it sits! Eli, if they never return perhaps we can sell it off to pay for your efforts in correcting the credit situation.

I think I'm going to be okay. The fraud department caught it the day the charges happened, so everything has been cancelled. Now it's a matter of filling out the requisite paperwork and waiting for my new card to get here, which is only a mild nuisance on the grander scale of things. *sigh* I think you should create a shrine of sorts to your contractors and then explain -- if they do come back! -- that the house pets started their own religion and it would be sacrilege to desecrate their sacred space.