A Repairman Refused to Fix a Customer’s Truck at the Job Site—Leaving Him to Pay a Steep Towing Bill and Question If the Refusal Was Even Justified
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Hey, you can only do so much with the tools you have.
And in the case of this story, I mean that literally!
The guy who wrote it repairs all kinds of equipment, but he has to be smart about when and where he takes these jobs on.
He made a decision with one particular customer than ended up with the two of them going head-to-head.
Check out what he had to say and see if you think he did anything wrong.
AITA? Customer wanted me to fix his truck on the job site.
“I have a side job fixing equipment, machinery, trucks and trailers.
One of my customers was doing a parking lot expansion for a large assisted living community in the city and his dump truck driver blew the clutch in the truck while dumping a load of rock.
His foreman called me to come check it out. I pulled the inspection cover and saw it stripped the lining off the disk and the truck won’t move. it’s a Ford F750 with a Cummins 6BT and six-speed manual.
I told the foreman it was going to need a clutch. He said that’s what he figured and he called to have it towed to their shop so I could work on it.
This was about to get interesting…
Later that day I got called by the owner of the company. He was major angry because it was $1,600 to tow the truck an hour back to the shop. He asked me why I didn’t just replace the clutch right there.
I told him the tools and equipment were at the shop. I needed a solid concrete floor to work on, the parking lot was asphalt and the jacks just sink into and damage the asphalt.
It wasn’t safe to do it there.
He has a point about this…
I also felt that it would be really tacky and unprofessional to do major repairs in his customer’s parking lot.
I also said it might take me a day or two to get the flywheel machined and get the parts all lined up in case there were more problems and again we didn’t have permission from the customer.
He pointed out I’ve done other things like replace a broken driveshaft on the side of the interstate, or replace a broken hydraulic pump at a job site, how could this be worse?
This guy wasn’t listening!
I reminded him the driveshaft didn’t need jacks or any major tools, and the pump had to be done there because that truck was loaded with 15 tons of rock and had to be dumped before it could be moved, and that also didn’t require jacking or major tools.
The next day the owner was okay and it was like he wasn’t ever mad. He gets like that sometimes.
AITA?”
Check out what readers had to say about this.
This person weighed in.
Another reader said he’s NTA.
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Another Reddit user agreed.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a longtime bank customer who walked away after the teller gave them a hard time.
And another individual weighed in.
Well, it sounds like he did exactly what he was supposed to do.
And I think he sounds like a consummate professional.
As for the other guy…
This customer was way out of line!
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