29/03/2018
I woke this morning to the email that follows this long, picture-less post. The swiss cheese blocks he refers to later were my attempt to pour an epoxy block to better keep his unstayed masts from rotating. I had thought about using wood but decided the epoxy would be an altogether more eloquent and long-lasting fix. I was wrong. They compress. Damn. I hate when I f**k something up, but it happens. For decades I’ve been self-employed, using all of my creativity and experience to try and create strong beautiful stuff for my clients, but sometimes I f**k up and it’s never good. It’s especially hard when a client is not willing to cooperate with me to try and find a solution. Some do, some don’t. I sent this one a full refund for the un-satisfactory work and a short note of apology for not fixing the problem that I attempted to fix. Unfortunately, unhappy clients always seem to talk more about their bad experiences. Maybe people just like to hear about negative experiences more than positive ones. The few clients I’ve had who were disappointed seem to have a much higher impact than the hundreds who were happy with the work, and the music. (The windlass is fine, unless he uses it to tow the boat at 20 knots or something, and as always, all complaints regarding the volume or content of the music are sent directly to the complaint department (Diego) who doesn’t really give a s**t what anyone thinks:)
The email:
I’ve paid you per your invoice but what a miserable experience. And now that I’ve had a chance catch my breath and look around I see that some of the work you’ve charged me for is poor and maybe even dangerous and will have to be redone.
I misunderstood you about the bolts you used on the windlass. I thought you’d gone to town to get appropriate bolts but I now see that you’ve used bevel heads and countersunk the 1/4" aluminum plate. That means, if I’m lucky, that there’s an average thickness of maybe an 1/8” of an inch of soft aluminum holding the windlass down. I understand that most of the force is shear force but not all of it is and even straight shear force is compromised by this installation, I think. No doubt it's weaker than it was. And it would have been so simple to do it right. If you really couldn’t find all-thread hex head bolts or threaded rod you should simply have used the bolts you bought, cut the heads off and used them as threaded rod with nuts and proper fender washers. Wish I'd thought of it sooner but I’m not the paid, professional rigger and I stupidly want to trust the professionals I hire not to do bad or dangerous work. Lots of boat workers are sloppy but doing something that could put me and my boat in danger is far below any standard I could have expected from you.
I’ll also end up redoing the epoxy swiss cheeses you made for the mast shims. They look so fragile I wondered if you’d really snugged up the bolts on them for fear they might collapse under proper torque and sure enough I found that two of the three on the main and both of the mizzen’s were barely snug. I fixed that but if you did snug them up right and I found them barely snug a day later then they did collapse some and won’t last.
And the deck you tore up? I should have stopped you when I saw the crow bar come out. For f**k’s sake.
I’ve had some questionable work done by people who claim to know what they’re doing but this is the worst yet. Several people, both your former customers and your colleagues warned me off you. But I reckoned it would be okay because my friend Marjo said she was okay with your work and she’s smart and picky. Taking Marjo’s advice has always worked for me in the past. This time I should have listened to the 5 others.
And not even bothering to help me get off your f**king dock with a breeze blowing me onto it? What in the world is wrong with you? Here’s a little tip: Don’t accept work from people you dislike. Better for you, better for us. And here’s another: be a decent, considerate human being and give your poor neighbors and customers a break. Use some of the money I just sent you to buy a f**king iPod.
A s**t experience from beginning to end.
