Yesterday I spoke briefly with a man who used to work for one of the most well known plumbing and HVAC companies in town. I won’t use their name here, so I’ll just call them Con Man Services. They’re actually not owned by the local proprietor whose name they bear; he sold the outfit to a huge corporation that operates in twenty states under multiple aliases. But they still put the supposed owner in the ads as though it were a local family owned mom & pop grocery. But you know you’re dealing with a lying sack of sewage when he says “And we’ll even give you $250 for that old water heater!”
Anyway, the man I spoke with told me about a slight variation in the sewer replacement scams I’ve written about earlier on this blog. The technique he saw them using at Con Man involved the technician unclogging a sewer using the smallest cutter he could. This would poke a hole in the stoppage, allow the water to drain again, but would not clean the line properly. Then they would run the camera for free and show the customer how bad the sewer looked, hoping to deceive him into thinking that he needed to replace the sewer.
And as if this weren’t crooked enough, Con Man also offers financing; so they could quote outrageous prices for replacing the sewer and poor people would have little choice but to tell Con Man to go ahead, make a little down payment, and then try not to wince while Con Man put the needle in their arm and hooked up the tube through which they would drain these people’s blood for the next few years at the low, low interest rate of 10% or so.
The man I was speaking to said “That was what made me quit. When I saw what they were doing to poor people, I just had to get away.”
I remember hearing a country boy say once, “Hell ain’t too hot.” It was an abbreviated form of the sentiment “Hell may be hot, but it isn’t as hot as these people deserve.” That doesn’t really come from the Bible; but if God ever asks my opinion, I’ll definitely vote to add it to the next edition.
