Dilemma - to pay or not to pay?
Folks: I had an issue with a vehicle that I could not figure out; I'm a pretty competent home mechanic and rarely take anything to a shop. The shop where I took it spent 4 hours on the vehicle and...
Forum Discussion
smkettner wrote:MEXICOWANDERER wrote:The next lady may ask you to load some bricks and drive them to the next town in four hours.
Four years ago a Mexican lady asked me to fix her generator. After two hours I narrowed it down to a specific transistor that had shorted on the board. I would not think of charging her one centavo. No transistors of that genre were available.
So you load up her truck but find the bridge is out so you must return. She says you are not competent because you did not check the roads before you did the work. So she says unload and no pay. Good luck.
So next week the bridge repair foreman asks you to review the plans for the repair. You spend a day calculating and reviewing but it needs no real changes. Foreman says you really did not do anything so he will not pay. You are fine just knowing the repair will be made.
Reviewing the bridge plans is a engineering salary job for an employee, probably contracted by an Engineering firm or outfit. Otherwise it would be a fixed price contract job done by a professional sole proprietor whose specialty is engineeering. You'd get paid, regardless and probably would set up a billing schedule with some percentage of pay before starting, and the balance at completion.
No delivery company would take those terms, not even UPS or Fed Ex. There may be penalty clauses for late delivery, but the contract would be written correctly so that the carrier gets paid, with a minor penalty in pay for late delivery.
That's how the real world works, it's all in how the contract is written. The fool that doesn't understand a bit of contract law is the person that gets taken advantage of.
