08-28-2008, 10:48 AM
TROY D. STENZEL DBA Eastside Land Clearing and Yard Service
GETaxpayer ID: W30216306-01
Former Taxpayer ID: 30123137
I had the most horrible experience ever with mistakenly hiring the most unprofessional guy to clear out and make a switchback walking path to access my stream frontage. He quit without finishing the bid, demanded money that wasn't due by the terms, and yelled, called names, and bullied until it was either fork over something or call the cops. I shouldn't have given him anything, and when I did, he called me a thief repeatedly.
Other choice stuff coming out of his mouth:
F*ck off and die,
F*ck you Grandma
People like you is why locals hate haoles. (He's a haole)
In response to my telling him this was causing a huge amount of stress -- "Good, I hope you drop dead!)
Insults about our weight and fitness level (the path was specifically to be easy)
and ... the #1 reasons YOU on Punaweb should be warned:
Said that people in Puna are all ripoffs and burn him, and the reason he wouldn't finish the job is I had never planned to pay him anyway. (Funny thing that he threw the Puna card at me, because I live north of Hilo, but the guy is irrational and it was a rotten judgment to make if I had been in Puna.)
Also that anyone who hasn't been here for decades doesn't know the first thing about how to do anything in Hawai'i. (He is from Louisiana via MAUI to Puna)
So make no mistake this guy has some deep issues about haoles and newcomers and Puna residents ...
He also tried to scam me by saying he'd bought some rope specifically for the job, but when I asked for the receipt he flipped out at me for refusing to reimburse him. It was used rope as it turned out, so I guess the receipt would have made a liar of him. He took his rope back that I had paid him to string, and threw a bucket of rebar down the hillside in a hissy fit.
I could probably file a complaint against him for putting me under duress and extorting money from me. But I will probably just move on and chalk it down to lesson learned.
I ended up giving him another $100 for the work, telling him I was not paying him the other $100 (not that I owed it anyway) because his insults and yelling etc.. were rapidly reducing any value his work had. I gave him $40 for the rope as he'd asked, and then found out he took it away.
He left calling me Thief, thief, thief. It was very disturbing and I don't wish a similar experience on anyone!
A few details about the job:
Troy made me a bid, which is how he likes to work, not by hourly.
I accepted, paid him $300 down on the $1000 bid, the rest to be paid ON COMPLETION. No terms involving him doing what he did and refusing to complete the job.
He originally quoted rope as the only material he would need, but after his first day required I buy $500 in materials, which I did, which he cut up so they can't be returned.
There already was a steep trail, made by the prior owners, and I was real clear that what I wanted was safe access that wasn't an adventure hike ... not a zipline into a tree, a gently sloping walking path with a few stairs. That's what he promised, and he said it would be four foot wide.
What I got was one foot in places and the sides sloughing off.
He didn't listen to what I asked for with the entry, which was to start with a switchback, because he thought it was ugly to walk by old fence with yard slash. Instead he put in sketchy steps where the "steps" actually had a slope.
My property is soft fine dirt, not rocks, so even I can stick a shovel in it and make the back of a step, but making it retain a step shape is not so easy and what he tried to do was just stupid and a waste of effort, and could get a person killed.
I had a level way in from the road below my house, from the bridge,that was my original plan, to have him clear it, but he talked me into the more private route down through the trees.
When he left after the second day (half days), he told me to check out the trail and he'd be back in the morning to finish the rest in a few more hours, at which point I needed to have cash for him.
What I found was a steep drop over roots and mud with so-called "steps" of soft dirt, with half-assed risers held by rebar in soft dirt that fell apart the first time we tested them. Some "steps" were actually slopes between the risers, so a person would skid in the mud and then no doubt the next riser would fail under light pressure. The rebar was sticking up above the risers so a person could get torn up. The "handrail" of rope was in places a full arm's length from the step and I asked him to bring it in. He refused.
We also asked why he didn't do the switchbacks and instead had at least 50 of these dangerous "steps" of soft mud. The trail was 1 foot wide in places (proposed four feet). He hadn't even gotten past the halfway mark, and some of what he had gone over was the original sketch trail, not improved upon.
Yes, he had cut down a lot of junk trees (mostly small), and that's why he thought he should be paid more, but I didn't hire him to clear trees. I hired him to get a path, and without a usable path that went all the way down, the project was of no value at all.
Upshot was, he had a tantrum as soon as his design was questioned. I had let him do his thing. I don't breathe down people's necks. I checked on the trail when he told me to, after the second half day work, after he left, and knew we had to talk before he put more time into this hack job and called it done.
We didn't ream him a new one. We knew he had a short fuse already. But he couldn't handle any revision. He wanted to do some more makeshift steps and get his additional $700 and be out of there in less time than the 3 days of work he had bid.
So the alternative he picked was to quit on the grounds that we were some newbies to Hawai'i (six years, landscaped several properties), and the kind of people who cannot be pleased. We tried to reason with him and even told him to go ahead and finish the bottom half and we would make our own modifications for safety of the existing work.
No, because now he doesn't like us and won't work around us, so just pay me $200 more NOW and I'll leave. And he wouldn't let up, and when I said I wasn't down with his unprofessional tantrum and being left in the lurch after putting $1000 of my money into it, then he got really nasty and abusive.
When he told me he KNEW I never intended to pay him, I lost it. I had gone to the bank twice for him and gotten all the cash to pay him, and rearranged my whole schedule to do it, and paid him his down payment. Everything done in good faith on my part. It was just the last straw to have this jerk start chanting "you're a thief" like a mantra. Arghhh!
I'm still stressed out.
Moral -- never never never relax just because a person is recommended through Punaweb. He may have been fine before but now on personality-altering drugs or god knows what. Or he wasn't crossed at all on the other job. The guy CAN whack down trees and brush. He just couldn't do the part requiring some detail, engineering, and finesse, because he works like a guy on 'roids. Zero patience.
Bottom line, I'm sorry he bid something he couldn't do in the time he thought he could, but in my world a BID is the final price. There can be add-ons by customer request, but you can't double your bid for the original scope of work after it's accepted and you start work. And if you choose to walk off the job you can't change it to a time and materials job, which is what he wanted to do.
You especially can't go time and materials when you don't even have an hourly rate, you are just pulling a "value" for your work out of your hat (or a lower part of your anatomy).
It was really stupid of me to do a verbal agreement without a written description of the work. Never again. I did ask him to sign a receipt for the down payment, which he did, on which I wrote the monetary terms and that the $700 was "on completion." And he signed that. So I don't think I owed him the $140 I gave him to get him to go away. That was basically extortion on his part.
Not sure if what he did can be fixed, but within 30 minutes we had changed his goat trail down a slope into a gradual switchback that is safe without rope ... but there's a lot more distance and my son, who CAN do it, has already twice what he has time to do on his plate.
So don't make the same kind of mistake!
PS. As an example of the nerve of this guy, after he quit and started complaining about all the time he put in, I reminded him the original proposal was that he expected it was a three day job. He had worked two half days (or less) and this was his third trip, which had been no work ...
I said look, you promised 3 days, which is 24 hours, so you are making good money, that was over $40 an hour for the 3 day job -- and at the point he quit he wanted $500 for about 8 hours of real time.
He said, "I said three days, nothing about how long a day is."
I said most reasonable people estimate a day at 8 hours. He said, no way, a day is showing up. So by his logic, you can show up, work 15 minutes, leave on 3 days and call that a 3 day job. [
!]
Whatever happened to having some respect for a person who has hired you and not calling them personal insults? And since when is the customer supposed to accept WHATEVER shoddy work you do even if it doesn't resemble what you promised them? I mean, it's one thing for a client to be picky and make you do stuff over and over and not wanting to pay extra, but I was always clear what I wanted. He chose not to listen.
Oh, and he also accused me of wanting to foist an "ugly path" off on a buyer because I'm just one of those people who wants to sell, rip off the buyer, and get out.
I TOLD him I am selling the property. I told him that I wanted to add value by making a real and important improvement -- safe easy access to the beautiful stream. I told him that SAFE was more important than aesthetics. Any buyer can SEE the aesthetics. Deception is foisting off an unsafe path. I won't do that. As for the aesthetics, it's rain forest, and plants grow quickly. I told him I would landscape the unattractive parts.
Does that make me an unethical speculator? I don't think so. For all I know the property will sell for the same price regardless, but it was something that needed to be done and I felt that I wanted to do it and give something more usable to the next owner.
GETaxpayer ID: W30216306-01
Former Taxpayer ID: 30123137
I had the most horrible experience ever with mistakenly hiring the most unprofessional guy to clear out and make a switchback walking path to access my stream frontage. He quit without finishing the bid, demanded money that wasn't due by the terms, and yelled, called names, and bullied until it was either fork over something or call the cops. I shouldn't have given him anything, and when I did, he called me a thief repeatedly.
Other choice stuff coming out of his mouth:
F*ck off and die,
F*ck you Grandma
People like you is why locals hate haoles. (He's a haole)
In response to my telling him this was causing a huge amount of stress -- "Good, I hope you drop dead!)
Insults about our weight and fitness level (the path was specifically to be easy)
and ... the #1 reasons YOU on Punaweb should be warned:
Said that people in Puna are all ripoffs and burn him, and the reason he wouldn't finish the job is I had never planned to pay him anyway. (Funny thing that he threw the Puna card at me, because I live north of Hilo, but the guy is irrational and it was a rotten judgment to make if I had been in Puna.)
Also that anyone who hasn't been here for decades doesn't know the first thing about how to do anything in Hawai'i. (He is from Louisiana via MAUI to Puna)
So make no mistake this guy has some deep issues about haoles and newcomers and Puna residents ...
He also tried to scam me by saying he'd bought some rope specifically for the job, but when I asked for the receipt he flipped out at me for refusing to reimburse him. It was used rope as it turned out, so I guess the receipt would have made a liar of him. He took his rope back that I had paid him to string, and threw a bucket of rebar down the hillside in a hissy fit.
I could probably file a complaint against him for putting me under duress and extorting money from me. But I will probably just move on and chalk it down to lesson learned.
I ended up giving him another $100 for the work, telling him I was not paying him the other $100 (not that I owed it anyway) because his insults and yelling etc.. were rapidly reducing any value his work had. I gave him $40 for the rope as he'd asked, and then found out he took it away.
He left calling me Thief, thief, thief. It was very disturbing and I don't wish a similar experience on anyone!
A few details about the job:
Troy made me a bid, which is how he likes to work, not by hourly.
I accepted, paid him $300 down on the $1000 bid, the rest to be paid ON COMPLETION. No terms involving him doing what he did and refusing to complete the job.
He originally quoted rope as the only material he would need, but after his first day required I buy $500 in materials, which I did, which he cut up so they can't be returned.
There already was a steep trail, made by the prior owners, and I was real clear that what I wanted was safe access that wasn't an adventure hike ... not a zipline into a tree, a gently sloping walking path with a few stairs. That's what he promised, and he said it would be four foot wide.
What I got was one foot in places and the sides sloughing off.
He didn't listen to what I asked for with the entry, which was to start with a switchback, because he thought it was ugly to walk by old fence with yard slash. Instead he put in sketchy steps where the "steps" actually had a slope.
My property is soft fine dirt, not rocks, so even I can stick a shovel in it and make the back of a step, but making it retain a step shape is not so easy and what he tried to do was just stupid and a waste of effort, and could get a person killed.
I had a level way in from the road below my house, from the bridge,that was my original plan, to have him clear it, but he talked me into the more private route down through the trees.
When he left after the second day (half days), he told me to check out the trail and he'd be back in the morning to finish the rest in a few more hours, at which point I needed to have cash for him.
What I found was a steep drop over roots and mud with so-called "steps" of soft dirt, with half-assed risers held by rebar in soft dirt that fell apart the first time we tested them. Some "steps" were actually slopes between the risers, so a person would skid in the mud and then no doubt the next riser would fail under light pressure. The rebar was sticking up above the risers so a person could get torn up. The "handrail" of rope was in places a full arm's length from the step and I asked him to bring it in. He refused.
We also asked why he didn't do the switchbacks and instead had at least 50 of these dangerous "steps" of soft mud. The trail was 1 foot wide in places (proposed four feet). He hadn't even gotten past the halfway mark, and some of what he had gone over was the original sketch trail, not improved upon.
Yes, he had cut down a lot of junk trees (mostly small), and that's why he thought he should be paid more, but I didn't hire him to clear trees. I hired him to get a path, and without a usable path that went all the way down, the project was of no value at all.
Upshot was, he had a tantrum as soon as his design was questioned. I had let him do his thing. I don't breathe down people's necks. I checked on the trail when he told me to, after the second half day work, after he left, and knew we had to talk before he put more time into this hack job and called it done.
We didn't ream him a new one. We knew he had a short fuse already. But he couldn't handle any revision. He wanted to do some more makeshift steps and get his additional $700 and be out of there in less time than the 3 days of work he had bid.
So the alternative he picked was to quit on the grounds that we were some newbies to Hawai'i (six years, landscaped several properties), and the kind of people who cannot be pleased. We tried to reason with him and even told him to go ahead and finish the bottom half and we would make our own modifications for safety of the existing work.
No, because now he doesn't like us and won't work around us, so just pay me $200 more NOW and I'll leave. And he wouldn't let up, and when I said I wasn't down with his unprofessional tantrum and being left in the lurch after putting $1000 of my money into it, then he got really nasty and abusive.
When he told me he KNEW I never intended to pay him, I lost it. I had gone to the bank twice for him and gotten all the cash to pay him, and rearranged my whole schedule to do it, and paid him his down payment. Everything done in good faith on my part. It was just the last straw to have this jerk start chanting "you're a thief" like a mantra. Arghhh!
I'm still stressed out.
Moral -- never never never relax just because a person is recommended through Punaweb. He may have been fine before but now on personality-altering drugs or god knows what. Or he wasn't crossed at all on the other job. The guy CAN whack down trees and brush. He just couldn't do the part requiring some detail, engineering, and finesse, because he works like a guy on 'roids. Zero patience.
Bottom line, I'm sorry he bid something he couldn't do in the time he thought he could, but in my world a BID is the final price. There can be add-ons by customer request, but you can't double your bid for the original scope of work after it's accepted and you start work. And if you choose to walk off the job you can't change it to a time and materials job, which is what he wanted to do.
You especially can't go time and materials when you don't even have an hourly rate, you are just pulling a "value" for your work out of your hat (or a lower part of your anatomy).
It was really stupid of me to do a verbal agreement without a written description of the work. Never again. I did ask him to sign a receipt for the down payment, which he did, on which I wrote the monetary terms and that the $700 was "on completion." And he signed that. So I don't think I owed him the $140 I gave him to get him to go away. That was basically extortion on his part.
Not sure if what he did can be fixed, but within 30 minutes we had changed his goat trail down a slope into a gradual switchback that is safe without rope ... but there's a lot more distance and my son, who CAN do it, has already twice what he has time to do on his plate.
So don't make the same kind of mistake!
PS. As an example of the nerve of this guy, after he quit and started complaining about all the time he put in, I reminded him the original proposal was that he expected it was a three day job. He had worked two half days (or less) and this was his third trip, which had been no work ...
I said look, you promised 3 days, which is 24 hours, so you are making good money, that was over $40 an hour for the 3 day job -- and at the point he quit he wanted $500 for about 8 hours of real time.
He said, "I said three days, nothing about how long a day is."
I said most reasonable people estimate a day at 8 hours. He said, no way, a day is showing up. So by his logic, you can show up, work 15 minutes, leave on 3 days and call that a 3 day job. [
!]Whatever happened to having some respect for a person who has hired you and not calling them personal insults? And since when is the customer supposed to accept WHATEVER shoddy work you do even if it doesn't resemble what you promised them? I mean, it's one thing for a client to be picky and make you do stuff over and over and not wanting to pay extra, but I was always clear what I wanted. He chose not to listen.
Oh, and he also accused me of wanting to foist an "ugly path" off on a buyer because I'm just one of those people who wants to sell, rip off the buyer, and get out.
I TOLD him I am selling the property. I told him that I wanted to add value by making a real and important improvement -- safe easy access to the beautiful stream. I told him that SAFE was more important than aesthetics. Any buyer can SEE the aesthetics. Deception is foisting off an unsafe path. I won't do that. As for the aesthetics, it's rain forest, and plants grow quickly. I told him I would landscape the unattractive parts.
Does that make me an unethical speculator? I don't think so. For all I know the property will sell for the same price regardless, but it was something that needed to be done and I felt that I wanted to do it and give something more usable to the next owner.
