You have to pay to play, baby!

And if don’t pay a contractor for services rendered, they’re not gonna finish the job for you…

It’s as simple as that!

Check out what happened in this story from Reddit, we think you’ll be impressed.

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.

Doh!

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 was 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 home owners’s request.

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.

Uh oh…

The thing is, the home owner had paid in full with a credit card at the start of the job. He decided to do a charge back, saying no goods or services were provided. Boss was mad.

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, 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 charge back 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.”

And here’s what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person shared their thoughts.

Another individual weighed in.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another person asked a question.

And this reader shared their thoughts.

This contractor wasn’t about to deal with this customer’s shenanigans!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.