so, maybe you have seen me post on this matter or mention it once, but for those who have not; my father is a small business owner with a flawless track record of providing the most excellent work and being the most honest and hardworking man i know.
a little over three years ago, he gets a call for a job over by the fairgrounds, the owner is a little old lady, in fact a retired Realtor, and she apparently makes some money renting out little add on departmental that have been built onto her house around back. this is funny because we are sure the property is not zones for multi-residence dwellings, but shes clearly doing it anyway...
anyways, the house is a complete cluster f$ck as you might imagine seeing as how its been built onto several times to make like 6 new apartment rooms behind it. it also has a basement that she claimed to be trying to turn into another room to rent out, once she got facilities in place.
here is where my father (the plumber) comes in, every time city sewer has a blockage, it floods the floor drains in her basement with raw sewage, and being next to the fairgrounds, she claims to even get horse sh*t and hay back flow too. this house is old, it has a cast iron drainage system under the original parts and a couple of the expansions, all of which are poorly plumbed with poor grades to begin with.
we now have a policy at my fathers company, that we do no work for anyone who calls up and their first question is "are you insured, and can i have the information of your insurance agency." a fair question if you want to have a legit service done i suppose, that is why they never thought twice, and gave it to her, and proceeded to start working for her. truth is, no one has EVER asked to see my fathers credentials, he does not even advertise because he gets enough recommendations from structural foundation companies and previous jobs to keep him in enough work. if that does not speak for the quality of work my father does, i have no idea what more i could do to show you besides actually showing you....
lets try to shorten this story a bit, in a nutshell like i said this house needs a ton of work and many different divisions of work to get it running the way it should. so they schedule to tackle the most pressing issues at hand first and work their way up as she gets the funds available to pay for this work... so my father properly installs a backwater check valve and new drain cleanouts on both sides; note that this requires digging a 9 foot deep hole in the back yard, and re plumbing in 4 different outlets from this dwelling... hmmm. usually a house has one outlet.... maybe it has something to do with the 6 freaking separately plumbed dwellings that were half arsed added on? well the problems here is not tieing them in, but rather that there are simply additional problems that will need to be addressed in the future. namely the most obvious is a 4 foot piece of cast iron pipe that has rotted off and snapped loose under the pressure of the house being on top of it, we have to tie on to this piece to get the occupied dwelling back into working order so they can use their facilities obviously, but this is a leak and is going to need to be fixed, and this is also obviously a job that is not included in the bid for the work being done at the time of this discovery. all of this information is properly documented and submitted to the homeowner, i assure you of this. she agrees that its not the time to fix this as she cannot afford to start another job so quickly after this large one. so they finish up, and repack the hole with its dirt and grade the ground as best it can be done, then collect for the bill and leave. we receive a call a couple months on a weekend when we have company in town, but being the nice guy my father is, he gets dressed and drags my arse with him to go see what the problem is. one of the apartment dwellings is backing up, and sure enough once we get it cleaned out and run a camera, its the same line with the before mentioned broken cast iron pipe.
here is where the drama starts in, she refuses to pay. after trying to get her to pay for over a month, my father is about to just let it slide and give up, not worth his time to chase his money when its hardly over 1,000.
we get dragged back in to the drama, when we receive a call from our insurance being told that this lady is suing him over the work. this pisses my father off, and to put an end to it he takes her to small claims over the failure to pay for services, he wins and gets a court order to be paid for the services. since then, we have been getting calls from an electrician who cannot get his money out of her either, seeing a show she keeps canceling payment on her checks... hmm sounds familiar.. so we pull our files and see that of the 4 checks this lady has written us, NONE of them had the same name, or any other information on them. they are all different forms of her name. pull up her name on OSBI and shes got 20 some aliases and has been in court numerous times over not paying for services, or suing their insurance companies... so i think we can all see this is a con artist old hag and thats pretty much it.. shes found out how to use the legal system to her favor and get a little pay out every once in a while.
so for the last three years we have been putting up with letting our insurances lawyer deal with the case of her suing my father, trying to get a 5 figure payday out of us, that she is clearly never going to get. even if she could tell the same story twice, and keep her lies straight, the documentation is flawless and its obvious that my father is not in the wrong and this bi$^h is just trying to make money off nothing.
what pisses me off, is that this crap has been going on for 3 YEARS!!!! and outside the small claims case, this thing has not seen the inside of a court room once! why? because she has no ground to stand on, shes had 5 lawyers quit her, because she has either canceled payment on their checks, or they have seen she has no case what so ever, and no money to pay for them to drag it out.
so our insurance is tired of having their lawyer tied up in this, and wants to settle, naturally my father agrees, but informs them that he is in the right and if THEY want to pay her off to leave us all alone, that is their deal not ours and we are not paying this lying old hag a dime.
well. today is the day of the settlement, and we have been saying all along, the like every thing else, she wont show. what was out lawyers responce when we told him she would be a no show? "SHE HAS TO SHOW, OR SHE WILL BE IN CONTEMPT OF COURT!".
lol, you think she showed up today? hell no! she called in on it claiming her daughter died this morning. sure losing a loved on is a sad deal, but i am not buying it.. some things are just a little to predictable, if her daughter really died today, of all days, when this settlement had been scheduled for months! with everyone knowing she wouldn't show up, then the odds on this happening hit with them being grossly worse then the lottery.
this whole thing is b/s and it has removed any bit of faith i ever had in our american court system. there is no excuse for this b/s, a case like this should have been handled inside a year and done with!
a little over three years ago, he gets a call for a job over by the fairgrounds, the owner is a little old lady, in fact a retired Realtor, and she apparently makes some money renting out little add on departmental that have been built onto her house around back. this is funny because we are sure the property is not zones for multi-residence dwellings, but shes clearly doing it anyway...
anyways, the house is a complete cluster f$ck as you might imagine seeing as how its been built onto several times to make like 6 new apartment rooms behind it. it also has a basement that she claimed to be trying to turn into another room to rent out, once she got facilities in place.
here is where my father (the plumber) comes in, every time city sewer has a blockage, it floods the floor drains in her basement with raw sewage, and being next to the fairgrounds, she claims to even get horse sh*t and hay back flow too. this house is old, it has a cast iron drainage system under the original parts and a couple of the expansions, all of which are poorly plumbed with poor grades to begin with.
we now have a policy at my fathers company, that we do no work for anyone who calls up and their first question is "are you insured, and can i have the information of your insurance agency." a fair question if you want to have a legit service done i suppose, that is why they never thought twice, and gave it to her, and proceeded to start working for her. truth is, no one has EVER asked to see my fathers credentials, he does not even advertise because he gets enough recommendations from structural foundation companies and previous jobs to keep him in enough work. if that does not speak for the quality of work my father does, i have no idea what more i could do to show you besides actually showing you....
lets try to shorten this story a bit, in a nutshell like i said this house needs a ton of work and many different divisions of work to get it running the way it should. so they schedule to tackle the most pressing issues at hand first and work their way up as she gets the funds available to pay for this work... so my father properly installs a backwater check valve and new drain cleanouts on both sides; note that this requires digging a 9 foot deep hole in the back yard, and re plumbing in 4 different outlets from this dwelling... hmmm. usually a house has one outlet.... maybe it has something to do with the 6 freaking separately plumbed dwellings that were half arsed added on? well the problems here is not tieing them in, but rather that there are simply additional problems that will need to be addressed in the future. namely the most obvious is a 4 foot piece of cast iron pipe that has rotted off and snapped loose under the pressure of the house being on top of it, we have to tie on to this piece to get the occupied dwelling back into working order so they can use their facilities obviously, but this is a leak and is going to need to be fixed, and this is also obviously a job that is not included in the bid for the work being done at the time of this discovery. all of this information is properly documented and submitted to the homeowner, i assure you of this. she agrees that its not the time to fix this as she cannot afford to start another job so quickly after this large one. so they finish up, and repack the hole with its dirt and grade the ground as best it can be done, then collect for the bill and leave. we receive a call a couple months on a weekend when we have company in town, but being the nice guy my father is, he gets dressed and drags my arse with him to go see what the problem is. one of the apartment dwellings is backing up, and sure enough once we get it cleaned out and run a camera, its the same line with the before mentioned broken cast iron pipe.
here is where the drama starts in, she refuses to pay. after trying to get her to pay for over a month, my father is about to just let it slide and give up, not worth his time to chase his money when its hardly over 1,000.
we get dragged back in to the drama, when we receive a call from our insurance being told that this lady is suing him over the work. this pisses my father off, and to put an end to it he takes her to small claims over the failure to pay for services, he wins and gets a court order to be paid for the services. since then, we have been getting calls from an electrician who cannot get his money out of her either, seeing a show she keeps canceling payment on her checks... hmm sounds familiar.. so we pull our files and see that of the 4 checks this lady has written us, NONE of them had the same name, or any other information on them. they are all different forms of her name. pull up her name on OSBI and shes got 20 some aliases and has been in court numerous times over not paying for services, or suing their insurance companies... so i think we can all see this is a con artist old hag and thats pretty much it.. shes found out how to use the legal system to her favor and get a little pay out every once in a while.
so for the last three years we have been putting up with letting our insurances lawyer deal with the case of her suing my father, trying to get a 5 figure payday out of us, that she is clearly never going to get. even if she could tell the same story twice, and keep her lies straight, the documentation is flawless and its obvious that my father is not in the wrong and this bi$^h is just trying to make money off nothing.
what pisses me off, is that this crap has been going on for 3 YEARS!!!! and outside the small claims case, this thing has not seen the inside of a court room once! why? because she has no ground to stand on, shes had 5 lawyers quit her, because she has either canceled payment on their checks, or they have seen she has no case what so ever, and no money to pay for them to drag it out.
so our insurance is tired of having their lawyer tied up in this, and wants to settle, naturally my father agrees, but informs them that he is in the right and if THEY want to pay her off to leave us all alone, that is their deal not ours and we are not paying this lying old hag a dime.
well. today is the day of the settlement, and we have been saying all along, the like every thing else, she wont show. what was out lawyers responce when we told him she would be a no show? "SHE HAS TO SHOW, OR SHE WILL BE IN CONTEMPT OF COURT!".
lol, you think she showed up today? hell no! she called in on it claiming her daughter died this morning. sure losing a loved on is a sad deal, but i am not buying it.. some things are just a little to predictable, if her daughter really died today, of all days, when this settlement had been scheduled for months! with everyone knowing she wouldn't show up, then the odds on this happening hit with them being grossly worse then the lottery.
this whole thing is b/s and it has removed any bit of faith i ever had in our american court system. there is no excuse for this b/s, a case like this should have been handled inside a year and done with!
