What was your most costly mistake ?

[nikon70]

under quote because i need the money!!!
then job takes twice as long....

i dont bother now, just charge what i want! if they want it done properly they'll pay if not its polish or other eu worker with no insurance or comeback if it goes wrong

example.

eu builder fitted sink in new loft
was leaking like a bugger (i got called out emergency to turn off water)
told jut to fix would be £200
lady told me well the guy that fitted it only charged me £100....
so i told her... well get him back to fix it then.
her reply... his number is not working anymore...

and thats the story of cheap people wanting work done...

i did not get the job to fix the bodge job of the sink/tap/pipework

 

[oliverxsk]

part with my first girl friend....

 

[confidentincompetent]

Getting conned into taking a personal pension out...They should call it the mother of all pyramids scams.

.


Bastids....

 

[hairyben]

Most costly mistake was in march '07

Me to accountant: Mike, I'm gonna do the VAT threshold for this year ending now, do I need to register?

Accountant: Don't worry about it.



2nd most costly- Damaged a gas main buried within a wall of the basement steps in someones front garden.

Called transco, they turned up, spend 10 minutes repairing it, and charged £700.

So be warned, this is what happens when you do the right thing and don't just get your plumber mate to bodge it, transco would rather rip money off people than take the safety of their network seriously.

 

[Thermo]

now transco i found very fair and reasonable when we went through a gas pipe. the guy admitted there was nothing we could have done. we got charged £180. Edf on the other hand are complete ******s. Ive got a dispute going on with them at the moment. We went through a cable and they sent through all the info including the time sheets etc, which showed every one took 3 hrs to do the work and 1/2 hr travelling on top. Only trouble was the work was done inside of 1 hr. lying bastards

 

[chr15]

Trying to lift a 2 metre x 600 double rad onto its brackets, getting injured, costing me a fortune in lost earnings while I sit at home waiting for it to heal, slow process

 

[Paul Barker]

Scared to admit I set light to an lpg boiler, back to merchants for another one.

Please don't tell anyone?

 

[ajstoneservices]

Scared to admit I set light to an lpg boiler

.

I haven't done that on an LPG Ideal Classic

 

[TicklyT]

Rushing to tidy up on a Friday afternoon, because the customer was chasing us out of the door. I replaced an access hatch in the floor the wrong way round, and put a screw through a heating pipe on the 2nd floor of an office in a listed building.

Wrecked first and ground floor ceilings. Nobody knew about it until they got back to work on Monday morning.

 

[GreenCat]

Not my own personal mistake but someone I know pretty well . . .

Hotel has a problem with saniflo unit not pumping (there's a shock!)
Plumber and apprentice turn up, plumber tells apprentice to take this hose into the next room and put it down the toilet there so that they can empty the waste pipe from the saniflo unit.

Apprentice dutyfully puts hose down said toilet but forgets to put the lid down.

About 15' of liquid c**p then forces its way down the hose pipe under some pressure as the unencumbered end of the hose whips around like a whirling dirvish.

Wondering what the noise was, plumber and apprentice go through to the room to investigate only to find the entire hotel room splattered with . . . well, you get the picture.

Eeek!

Apprentice moved on to another firm!

 

[mendusa]

Was been put under pressure to get lighting trunking up when i crashed into a reception table in a b and q that was been refurbished with my hoist it was 4 o clock in the morning and as many people told me they should waited till we finished work before the the bale in excuses aside well got moved from that site the following week to a site closer to home so it worked out well in the end

 

[DIYedboy]

This happened to a plumber friend of mine- called out to a blocked domestic soil stack, tells the woman inside not to use the toilet, then he starts cutting through it, all of a sudden he hears a whooshing sound and before he has time to think 'oh *hit' he's totally covered head to foot. The woman was very apologetic whilst she hosed him down in the garden, it was 2 years before he told his wife about it!

 

[Nige F]

burnt a house down.

No joke, that was a bad day!

Was that Uppark in Hampshire- owned by the National Trust ?

 

[nwph]

Sometimes i hate plumbing ,20 yrs experience ,and it just bites you on the arse .

Took on a tiny bathroom job ,full lot ,new floor ,plastering and tiling .

So far the plasterers labourer decided to burn through a dust sheet instead of cutting it ,setting fire to the customers shoes ,he then cleaned the buckets out and threw the empty water over the snow leaving a trail of plaster dust on the lawn ,now its all melted .

There was a delay with the sanitary ware ,so i guestimated the postion of the pipes for the basin ped ,and guess what the ped has arrived ,it the thinest ped ever and the pipes can be seen ,but now its all floored and tiled ,i'm well ****ed off with myself ,usually so precise .

Customer looked in and said everything looks nice ,but i can see it and it doesn't look right .

Oh yeah she had an old blind hung up on the window ,so to get it down i had to snap the bracket ,guess what ,she's cleaned it up and wants the blind back up .

The job was for a family friend aswell so the price is bloody garbage.

 

[CortinaV8]

Are you Paul or Barry?

Not my mistake, I dont make them but an apprentice on a large cat6 installation with all trunking and boxes sunk into the walls on an a large expensive office renovation managed to cut all the bundles of cables 5 meters too short to reach the patch panel, whole lot had to be replaced again!

It wasn't a total waste of time, however, some of the guys had been winding the builders up during the job and a few of the drops had been cut, took hours to repull every cable!