Response from A J Lawn Sprinkler Co Inc
I would like to clear a few things up in regards to this issue. As far as our punctuality goes, according to my time records (where the service tech times in to your work order on a computer or tablet) we made it to your property within every time window we gave you. Our records show that we hadn't been to the property since 2009 for service, so this was the first time we had been to the property in 4-5 years. The office comment on the work order from our initial visit on 5/16/14 reads "CUSTOMER STATES 3 BREAKS IN THE PIPE- CUSTOMER WILL SHOW YOU." We discovered that there was a problem we had to address before the broken pipe problem: that four control valves needed to be replaced. This is a lot more work than a few broken pipes, thus the need to reschedule. We gave a verbal estimate of about $450-550 for this work. We weren't called back to schedule the work until 6/2, and scheduled for 6/10, only seven days later in our busy season. The work came to $403.80, fifty dollars under the low end of our estimate. Because we had to glue PVC pipe, we couldn't turn the system back on right away, we had to return at a later date. At this time, our schedule was full with Spring Activations for our regular customers that we do every year, most of these booked weeks or months in advance. We returned 10 days later, the first time we could in our busy schedule, to address the problem from the original service call: three line breaks. Our technician spent a little under four hours on the property, after we discovered even more work was needed to bring the system to functionality. We replaced the old timer with a new one, replaced 8 broken sprinkler heads and repaired 3 pipe breaks in the backyard, all approved by the customer. These problems couldn't have even been diagnosed properly until the previous fix was complete. The total of all the work came to about $1,150.00. In October, months after our last visit to the property, we hadn't received payment for any of the work at all, not even the first service call. Here is the note our office person made after calling to collect payment on 10/2/14: "JOHN SPOKE TO HIM ABOUT PAYING HIS BILLS AND HE WAS NOT PAYING BECAUSE HE WAITED TOO LONG FOR US TO GO BACK. SO HE HAD AGGRAVATION. HE SAID HE WOULD PAY 1,000.00 ABOUT 150$ LESS." The quality of our work was never in question. We were forced to accept this settlement in order to collect anything at all. We did a lot of work at this residence fixing up a very old sprinkler system that we did not install originally, and which to our knowledge hadn't had regular maintenance for many years. When doing service it is impossible to plan for every contingency, and we have a schedule to keep with other customers, we cannot leave them hanging with the appointments we already made. So sometimes we have to move on to the next service call and reschedule. We are unbelievably busy in the spring and early summer, and do our best to be fair to all our customers with scheduling and timing. We took about a hundred and fifty dollars off of the final price, essentially making no profit for all of the time we spent on this system. We determined that this was an account that we would rather not have to service in the future, due to the cost involved. We regret that any customer would have such a low opinion of us when we try very hard to provide excellent service. -Jesse Napolitano, manager