When you have something that needs to be fixed and you need to hire someone to fix it, it’s always great to get a personal recommendation from a friend or family member.

In today’s story, the electrician one man would usually hire is out of town, so his parents hire someone else and are over-charged for the job.

As luck would have it, that same man is later hired by the electrician to fix his roof, and he makes sure to get even with an extremely expensive bill.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

Seriously up-charged a guy that up-charged my parents

My parents were renovating their house about a year ago and they needed an electrician to move some lighting fixtures.

Generally, I have a friend that’s my go-to electrician for stuff like this, but my parents had hired a guy to paint the living room and needed this done quickly.

My electrician friend happened to be on vacation so he wouldn’t be able to get out to me until after the painter was already scheduled to come.

After referring with a couple of other friends, they recommended an electrician. We are all from the same country and happened to emigrate to the same small town so people within our culture generally recommend other people from that same country.

The electrician comes by for a quote (I never met this individual) and he tells my parents that it’s all based on the amount of time it would take and that he can’t give them an exact quote because he doesn’t know how much time it’s going to take until the job is already started.

My parents think this sounds reasonable and end up hiring him.

The electrician charged OP’s parents for 5 hours that he wasn’t even working.

Just as an aside, I installed nest cameras for my parents in their living room facing their front door, so we had a good view of the area where the job was being performed.

This job takes him about an hour and he literally sat on my couch on his phone for about 5 hours, watching tv, kicking his feet up, waiting for my mom to get home so that he could show her the work is complete and charge her like 6 hours for a job that took him about an hour, which I confirmed how unprofessional his behavior was on my nest cam.

My parents didn’t want to cause any friction so they paid him for the amount of time he charged them. I believe it was like $500 for something that should’ve really cost like $150 or so. Anyway, the lighting fixtures were installed, he received his check and went in his merry way.

My electrician friend later confirmed that this guy had seriously up-charged my parents.

OP took a side job for a solar company and was hired by the electrician.

A few months later, I decided to take a side-gig selling solar as a 1099 employee. I was making decent money at my existing job but I had a wide enough network where I could help people around me with generally good solar deals and make some good money for myself on the side.

The company I connected with would give me “my price” on panels including installation, as well as on the roof if a roofing job was required. My price was extremely good and the way I made my money was by tacking on my fee at the end, built into the roof price and the per-watt price of the panels + installation.

Much like my parents found the electrician, this same electrician, (who I had never met) found me, inquiring about a roofing job.

OP decided to take advantage of the electrician’s leaky roof.

I told him that I don’t do stand-alone roofs but that I could package something for him including solar which would get rid of most of his electricity bill.

He said he didn’t have the money up-front for the roof or the panels, which is fine cause we can finance and it started to sound like he was a little bit desperate as his roof was leaking and he didn’t have the capital to fix it.

Generally when I go to a client, I try to keep the price down and make it more desirable for the client (I’d rather make less money than no money,) so I generally make around $3000-5000 per install, which is a win-win.

When I got the call, I thought the guy’s name was familiar and sure enough it was the electrician who had “helped” my parents and left a bad taste in my mouth. At this point, I knew he was desperate for a resolution to his roof issue and I knew he barely spoke any English, so my word was going to be gold.

OP decided to overcharge the electrician.

I set up an appointment to go meet up with him in about a week.

I knew that I was going to up-charge him due to the language barrier he would have with other installers, his desperation and the fact that he up-charged my parents.

I got the price quote from the installer that said the roof would cost about $10,000 for a strip and re-roof. This was a really good house as the house was a multi-family unit and I was expecting the quote to come around 15k. They also gave me the price on the solar panels which would be around $15,000. So the price I was looking at for the project was $25,000.

Generally on a good situation like this, I might’ve called in $29,000 total, got him a spectacular deal, make a couple grand and called it a day, but I was thinking f*** this guy. So I adjusted the cost of the roof to $19,000 and the price of the panels to $21,000, half expecting that I would eventually need to come down on the pricing at some point.

The electrician agreed to the deal.

I went over there to meet up with him, proposed his set-up, told him how good the quality of the roofing job would be (which is accurate) and that the solar system would virtually wipe out his electricity bill and that I would get him set up with a 25 year loan to keep his monthly payment down.

He agreed to this, was excited to get his roof done and really didn’t care much about the panels, but they were part of the bundle and on we went.

Once everything was installed, I was paid out on my deal and went to cash my $15,000 check.

I went to my parents house and gave them $1500 each and explained to them what had happened and how I stumbled upon a $15,000 commission check.

OP explained how everything he did was up and up.

Just so it’s clear, there is nothing shady about what I did. It was way more expensive than it needed to be and everything was disclosed to him properly. He just paid more than he would’ve had to, even if he simply shopped around, but at the end of the day, it’s well within my rights to charge whatever I want, like it’s within the rights of the customer to tell me to f*** off.

A big chunk of what he “paid” is covered by incentives, but he still paid way more than typical.

Moral of the story especially for contractors/plumbers/electricians/mechanics: don’t f*** people because you’re more aware of how things work than they are in a particular field, cause you might end up getting f***ed later 10-fold.

The electrician really should’ve gotten a second opinion. In the situation with the parents needing an electrician and the electrician needing a new roof, the commonality is that they were both in a hurry and didn’t get second opinions.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted…

This reader points out the difference between OP and the electrician.

Another reader approves of how OP made things right for his parents.

This reader credits karma.

Another person wants help getting solar.

One lesson here is to always shop around before hiring anyone.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.