When you bend over backward to fix a mistake, the last thing you expect is to get stabbed in the back.

What would you do if a customer demanded extra work after an accident, only to deny you ever did anything at all?

Would you continue to help them?

Or would you cut your losses and leave them to deal with the mess?

In the following story, one contractor finds himself in this exact situation with a client.

Here’s what happened.

Charge back for work not completed? Guess it must have been somebody else.

When I was in college (almost 20 years ago), I had a summer job working for a small builder.

We were building a good-sized deck and installing some large boulders around it as landscaping.

The guy driving the equipment used to move the boulders backed it into the side of the house.

A window and part of the wall were destroyed.

The corner of the equipment was about a foot inside the living room.

The guy we were working for explained everything to the homeowner and promised it would be fixed as soon as possible.

He even put it in writing at the homeowners’ request.

They planned a temporary fix until the materials came in.

The homeowner was upset, but seemed pretty reasonable and understanding.

We were there till almost 10 pm that night, building a temporary wall and covering it with plywood.

The owner and one other guy went back the next day to make it look a little nicer.

The plan was to order the window and siding and come back to do everything right once we had the supplies.

The cost to repair the house was much more than we were paid for the entire deck and landscaping job.

The thing is, the homeowner had paid in full with a credit card at the start of the job.

He decided to do a chargeback, saying no goods or services were provided.

The boss was mad.

Now, the boss was angry and refused to help the guy again.

He had agreed to every extra thing the homeowner had asked for… replacing another unbroken window so they would match, replacing the carpet in the entire room even though it wasn’t really damaged, repainting the entire room, a hallway, and two other rooms that were the same color so they would match, and a few other things.

The next time the homeowner called him for an update, the boss told him that he had received the chargeback, saying no goods or services were provided by him, so it must’ve been some other company that did the work.

He told them to call the other company and stopped answering the homeowner’s phone calls.

I like to imagine his malicious compliance worked, and it just ended there.

That he got away with only the money lost from the chargeback and not the cost of fixing the house.

I don’t know how it ended, summer was over, and I went back to school. I’m sure he fixed the house eventually.

Wow! Sounds like the guy took advantage of the situation.

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit have to say about it.

Some contractors will complete small fixes rather than claim them on insurance.

Here’s one idea.

Let’s all hope so.

He can submit the info, but the whole process takes time.

Customers like this are the worst!

After doing that, he has no obligation to do any further work.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.