For the last twenty years, I had been a roofer until I fell off a ladder.
The customers’s dog was running under the ladder.
Just I stepped onto the top rung, the dog darted under the ladder and sent it sliding sideways. I tried to grab onto the roof, but I couldn’t quite get a good hold of it. Three months later, I was still in a hospital recovering from a broken back and hip. I hadn’t worked since, and now I needed to have my roof replaced. I called a roofing contractor and asked for a quote to have my roof replaced. He showed up at the house and started doing an estimate, and I almost fainted when I saw the bottom line. I hadn’t worked in a year, but I didn’t think the price of roofing material had gone up so high. Nor did I think the wages of non-contract roofers had gone so high. I knew there was a problem, but I wasn’t sure how to approach this man. He seemed to be the type of person who thought he knew everything. My wife came home five minutes later, and I showed her the quote. Before I thought, she was laughing and told the man I would have never tried to bilk a customer this badly. She asked if I had told him I was a roofer until a year ago? The man swallowed hard and took the paperwork back while telling me he had transposed some numbers, which made the price nearly $5000 more than it should be.