We "hired" John to perform a few minor repairs at our apartment building. We paid John $1,000 up front and agreed to pay another $1,000 when the work was complete.
After consulting several people, we began to have misgivings about the amount of money we agreed to pay for the small amount of work we needed done and requested that John do less work on the service day for $1,000 we had already paid him. John agreed.
On the service day, John informed us that he had arrived in town three hours ahead of schedule and was impatient to begin work on the apartment. He asked if we had a hidden key somewhere on the property that he could use to access it without our being present. We informed him that of course we did not, and that we would send an agent to meet with him. Arriving fifteen minutes early to a job is considerate, arriving several hours early is obviously an imposition, but we tolerated it because John had already been paid.
While our agent was en route, John negotiated with us further, reducing his rate to an additional $500 for all of the work he initially agreed to do, which we agreed to.
When our agent arrived and opened the building, John immediately began replacing power outlets, a minor task that he'd suggested to us that was absolutely not of critical importance and would only improve the apartment cosmetically. Our agent left to perform routine maintenance tasks on the property, and when he returned twenty minutes later, John had already moved the refrigerator, which was in front of the wall where he was supposed to be installing a new wire that afternoon, back into place. When our agent asked whether he had already finished working behind the refrigerator, John said that he had. John then suggested that our agent did not need to remain on the property while he worked, and that another technician would be arriving shortly to assist him. It seems John was preoccupied with finding a way to "work" unobserved.
Our agent agreed that he did not need to supervise the work, but that before he left, he wanted to show John a light fixture that had been malfunctioning in recent years. Once it became clear that the light was broken, our agent went on an errand to the store to purchase a new light fixture for John to install.
John called us a half hour after our agent left for the store to inform us that his additional technician had not been needed after all, that the work was already finished, and that he had already left. This was roughly an hour after our agent gave him access to our building.
When we explained to him that we were quite well aware that he could not possibly have finished the work we hired him to do in the short amount of time that he'd spent at our building, and that we have a great deal of experience working with contractors of every sort, and that we wanted him to return to our building and complete the work he'd agreed to do, he simply said that he no longer wished to collect the additional money that we had agreed to pay him.
When he returned with the new light, our agent found all the areas that John had been given access to had been left unlocked. The power outlets that John had replaced were left on the counter along with several of their faceplates, which were new, and which John had been told not to touch, as we'd just replaced them a month prior. Some of our new faceplates were missing. All the trash from John's new installations had been left on the counter, or scattered on the floor, for us to clean up ourselves. Screws were left on the floor, a window sill, and somehow, in the kitchen sink. The single service that John had agreed to perform that he actually made some effort to complete was not even finished. He didn't replace the power outlet near the bedroom closet, presumably because he could not be bothered to look behind the closet door. None of the outlets that we had concerns about were seated in the wall properly, and some were in worse shape than when John arrived.
Finally, he also used our toilet and didn't flush, which judging by some other reviews appears to be how John signs his "work."
So obviously we are looking for a new electrician and would not rehire this one under any circumstances. Total lack of professionalism, respect, and common decency. read more
