I recently had a friend ask for help with a problem. When they originally redid their home, they installed an actual commercial range by Southbend- a firm which does not make appliances suitable for residential installations. It looked great, but when they used the oven, they almost set their home on fire! But, because the range isn’t designed for residential, its dimensions aren’t  stock residential dimensions. So, to replace it with a Wolf stove (http://www.subzero-wolf.com/oven/gas-range) , we needed a 60″ wide stove, and we had to pack it out 6″ extra. So, we needed a moving company (to get the original stove out) a plumber (to change the gas connection to a residential style), an electrician (to add a 220V outlet) carpenters to provide backers in the wall for a replacement shelf, a granite fabricator to build a 6″x6″ granite shelf, matching their existing countertops, to account for the 6″ difference in depth between the Southbend and the Wolf, and an iron fabricator to build a replacement plate shelf. Whew. Of course, when all is said and done, it came out great- and won’t burn my friend’s house down!! The simplest thing becomes totally complicated, and it happens all the time!

I picked up a call this week from a family that had engaged a company (not Myers Homes) to do tilework for them in their basement. The tile supplier sent out a third party delivery van, who promptly dragged a broken pallet of tile across a pristine concrete driveway almost 60′!! This left two parallel scratches all the way to the garage where the nails on the bottom of the pallet dug into the concrete surface and left two tracks. This person even maneuvered the pallet at the front of the garage leaving parallel curved marks, presumably to place the pallet in the garage  parallel to the door! I can’t imagine there’s anything that delivery co. could do now that will influence this family to believe that their employees aren’t all idiots! We are who we employ- our companies are made up of people. And while we aren’t all perfect by any means, it is imperative that the employees have an attitude of belonging and even ownership of jobs they are on. Jobs completed with happy customers bring in more work and more happy customers, sloppy and uncaring inattention to basic common-sensical things creates havoc and angry ex-customers. It’s devilishly hard to maintain great relationships, and all to easy to ruin them. When we hear the scraping, the operative action is STOP!!!