Recommendation

One of the nice things about working for yourself is that when you work for people you like the people they recommend you to also tend to be people you get on with, whereas the arseholes^[1] you wish you'd stayed clear of in the first place don't pass you on to other arseholes.

"Tend to", note. In general. Not always.

A pleasant couple I've done a few bits of work for over the years asked me to call up a neighbour of theirs who was having trouble with her boiler. This was on a Saturday. On the phone the neighbour volunteered that it was "A Potterton" in that way that you just know they think they're pretty clued up not only to be able to tell a boiler from a hole in the ground but to give you that much information on it, and any attempt to get them to further identify it and maybe even press an overheat reset button or suchlike is going to be about as profitable as trying to pin a politician down to an election manifesto commitment. Since it was pretty Arctic at the time and I was already booked up for Monday I offered to go round on the Sunday to look at it. Spent about half an hour taking covers off and testing bits to verify what the problem seemed to be and what it would need to fix it and told her. At this point she mentions that By The Way she's already got an engineer coming round the next morning to see to it.

What the ....?!!!

I suppose I should have charged her an arm and a leg for my time but I didn't even do that. They'll throw me out of the Federation of Rogue Traders if they find out. To be honest I just wanted out of there. I mean it wasn't just that the boiler was down in the basement (a big basement which seemed to go on round twists and turns forever) and she had a touch of the Kathy Bates about her; she even asked as I was leaving if I was married, and wanted to get married again. I was glad to be out in the fresh air ...

And then a couple of days later she phones up - in the middle of the evening - to complain that the other installer fitted a new programmer and she can't work out how to use it. Er, aren't there instructions for it? Yes but because she's so exceptionally intelligent (at this point I lost track of how her family had conspired against her because of her near-genius level of intellect to deny her the education she needed, or something) ... well for some reason she couldn't work the thing and the guy who'd fitted it, his mobile was switched off, I can't imagine why. I don't know if she expected me to leap into my RogueMobile and go over and sort it out for her (probably for free) that instant if not sooner, but I did manage to convey that that wasn't going to happen, and lose her. For now at least.

Now how do you block numbers on this phone?

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[1] It's not really fair to compare these sorts of people with the part of the body concerned with defecatory functions. An arsehole may not be everybody's idea of a pleasant organ but it does at least perform a useful function.