In aviation, even the smallest requests can snowball into costly habits.

One petty line service tech found a way to turn a demanding charter rep’s windshield obsession into a very expensive lesson.

Keep reading for the full story!

I work in aviation and we have some demanding customers

I work in corporate aviation as a line service and AOG tech. Lots of small issues to fix and small maintenance checks.

We have some customers that request morning services from the flight crew prior to them departing. Silly things like “top off my oil” or “clean off the windshield.”

We do charge for these, of course.

We work closely with a big-name charter company and do almost all their work.

This customer makes a lot of big demands.

Their site representative is a quite demanding customer and loves to shoot off emails at us for services and mild complaints without much consultation beforehand.

We had such an example two weeks ago where he was fed up with us always getting requests to clean windshields for the crew in the morning.

He requested we clean windshields as necessary prior to maintenance release of the aircraft.

But this tech wasn’t going to let this go.

Now, most of our techs have much better things to do, and so do I, but I’m very petty.

My answer is I screenshotted the email and write it in all of my work packages and charge for it.

He made sure to bill for every single cent of it.

Our standard rate is one hour labor time at roughly $120/hour, again, for approximately 10 minutes of cleaning windshields.

I do this for all releases now.

Other techs have followed suit.

Will customers ever stop demanding free labor from skilled professionals?

Redditors chime in with their thoughts.

Sometimes the only way to get through to someone is to set a hard boundary.

This commenter doesn’t really get how this whole thing works.

Many times, customers just don’t get it.

Sometimes you just have to tell a customer “no.”

Funny how a small request becomes expensive when you ask for it in writing.

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.