I bring Krispy Kreme to my alignment guy's shop. I don't pay shiet for my own car. He just does it for free.

All started when I brought the 81 911 in for an alignment in 2003-ish. I was talking about camber yadda yadda and was freaked out about a regular shop not knowing about the super exotic old 911. He says "Why don't we try an extra degree of negative camber and see how that works."

The end.

I had a friend ask me if I'd install a new backyard landscape for him at his new house. Then he asked if I'd buy, pick up & deliver all the plant materials at my contractors discount. I suggested he find another contractor that was in business to loose money.

Steve

"Can you to get all my materials and I will pay you back for them but only charge me for your men's labor?" Thank goodness I don't come across those people anymore. Last one was 15-20 years ago. When I say no, they get upset. WTH man?

My tight as a crab's ass unnamed relative did that to my sister, a landscaper.

Like 20 arborvitaes at her cost delivered 30 miles away. Gave her cost and $20 for gas.

Not a customer per say but one of our (back to nature looney tunes) residents left a message on the
town garage phone one day after a fairly heavy snow storm. She said she's quite certain that there is a law that we're supposed to plow the snow to the down hill side of the road ( read away from her driveway). We got a good chuckle out of that.

Was doing a PCC with a homeowner and he asked if we could frame for an extra window he could open up later. Sure, no problem.

And can you add one here? Um, sure

And two here? Hmmm...

And one more here? No and now that I think about it more, my inspector is going to make remove them.

No windows for you!

In our tax and accounting practice, we have the FU tax for clients like that. It's extremely variable in percentage, directly related to the amount of aggravation generated.

Fred - the title of the thread should be: Things that people say to you that are not your customers at all.

One of my favorite customers always says after we do our ritualistic pricing dance, “can’t we just compromise and all be a little disappointed?”

He always gets a good deal which is fair to both sides and not because of the grinding. He is respectful, knows when to push and when to cede, and understands boundaries. There is such a thing as deal karma.

Jeez, what's with all the acronyms? I'm a contractor and I don't know what DH nor PCC is.

Not sure I agree. If it's retail goods and services and you are competitively priced, why would you leave money on the table?

If you're at the flea market- then its game on. There is a guy: Chris Voss who is a CIA hostage negotiator. He's written several books, does seminars of which the core them is "Never Split the Difference". In most all situations I subscribe to that way of negotiating.

You can do this with out shaming the other party or making them feel bad. Quite the opposite in fact.

Back in the early days of digital creeping into professional photography our photolab purchased scanner and Photoshop and we offered Photoshop services to customers.

My favorite of all time stupid customer question was a lady came in with a picture of the cruise ship she had been on. She asked if I could scan the image and reverse it to see the name of the ship on the other side of the ship. I just stood there blinking trying not to fall down laughing.

Another guy came in and asked if I could remove a wall in a photo and see what is behind that wall. I did start laughing that time.

^^^^I've been in the photo business for years. One woman was all upset that there were pumpkins in all her photos and didn't understand why. I assumed she had the wrong set of photos and went over to have a look. Sure enough photos of a young woman with a little kid at a pumpkin farm. I asked her if she recognized the lady and child and she says yes, it's my daughter and grand child. I told her that they were at a pumpkin farm. She turns away and starts walking toward the door and says, I don't know why, but you always put pumpkin in my photos. Another woman got all upset at her photos of a party she had hosted and accused us of changing her dinnerware. She claims she used her good china and we swapped it for her regular set.
As far as bad customers, I had one school teacher all pissed off because I charged her for parts on her camera repairs because she knows I had a ton of parts cameras that I used to repair film cameras that the manufacturers no longer had parts for. Her reasoning was that I didn't pay for the parts ( I actually didn't, they were cameras that customers left behind because they didn't want to spend the money to repair them, but that's besides the point, they are my cameras now as per agreement with the customers) so I shouldn't be charging her for the parts.
I'm glad I no longer have to deal with "customers"

More proof that I have the best customers in the world.

I get a few that say, " We couldn't have done this without you. My wife is very happy, lets talk about the second phase, upstairs in a few months". There are lots of positive that come with my job too. They make all the differences in the world instead of dealing negative folks

Way back in the day when I worked at a retail computer store people would ask me to stop by after hours to look at stuff and they would pay me cash. For those people I didn't like I would tell them my free time was worth 5 times the rate they would pay the store for my services.

We delivered one project last year that was the biggest project we had ever done. It a very large and complex project we uploaded to the client. They paid us fairly promptly and we did major happy dance. We kept waiting on feedback on what they thought about it. It was a large area mapped at high resolution and is why I now have a computer with 256 gig of RAM and 14 terabytes of internal storage.

We would send the occasional email asking if the files fit their former maps and just any feedback. Just crickets. Finally just last week they said everything was excellent and just what they wanted and the engineers actually said wow more than a few times they liked our images so much. Phew. The really good news is they may want it all re-flown and updated to current. We can accommodate them! And we can do more happy dances.

Holy moly!!

So you picked that up at Walmart and grabbed some RAM and a couple of HDDs while you were there?

Nope. I ordered the parts from NewEgg, and assembled it myself. Two video cards. One is a Nvidia GeForce RTX2070 and the other is a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It has an i9 16 core, 32 threads, and two M.2 drives at 2 TB each, one for the boot and one for the work. Then the storage RAID5. All inside a huge tower case and it weighs a ton.

It can run through a aerial project in about 1/3 the time as the old computer. Not one game on it at all.

DH - Dick head

PCC - pre-construction conference

Funny you mention acronyms, as I’m surprised I figure out what they mean.