I Drove All Night ...

Me: 'Hey Jimbo (not his real name), can you do a car wrap branding for a Rally race team?'

Jimbo: 'Sure, no problems. When you want to do?'

Me: 'Ok cool. But you sure you can do, ah? It' not as easy as it seems if you've never done it before.'

Jimbo: 'Aiyaaa, can one, I do before, many, many times ...'

Me: 'Great, the installation date is tomorrow (yesterday). I'll meet you there with the stickers once I get it printed and cut to shape and size.'

Jimbo: 'No problem, I meet you there.'

Me: 'Urmmmm Jimbo, how long would it take for the installation?'

Jimbo: 'Very fast one, one or two hours only, you don't worry.'

Now, I should have been wary of the fact he said 'you don't worry' cos worry was what I did throughout the entire installation process and far from it taking one or two hours, it took an entire 14 hours which had be working from 12pm to 2 am in the morning today!

The worst thing is, I don't think he's ever done a car wrap branding project before cos he ruined a heck of a lot of my expensive 3M stickers and I had to get my partner scrambling in the office to reprint extra stickers countless times that I think whatever profits we would have made evaporated into thin air!

Damn, why can't people be honest with what they can and cannot do? I mean, if you can't build wooden swing sets and I ask you to build it, then tell me straight off you can't build it instead of saying 'don't worry, no problem'.

I've done this car sticker project for this client before with another installer (which charged me a bomb) and got the entire car done within 5 hours. The worse thing is the excuses he gave for ruining sticker after sticker which for the life of me I couldn't accept.

10% of the work in progress ...

Now, I'm the kind of person who does things hands on and learn from mistakes. I've personally done numerous car wraps myself and know the process quite well. It's just that these days I've given up doing installations myself any longer (it's the age factor la, getting too old for this crap) and just hire people to do it for me. And when they start giving me stupid reason thinking I don't know anything about the process is what irks me the most.

Come on la, just be honest. You ruined the stickers because you were incompetent, admit it, I won't mind. I welcome honesty. But to give me crappy reasons like 'my wife ran away with the squeegee' is not something I can swallow. The only consolation was that the client was a long time friend of mine so he didn't give me too much grieve about the time it took to do the car.

They were also in the midst of getting stuff organized for their race in Indonesia next month and his people were all working late as well so we could at least stay back till the wee hours to finally get the car done. Suffice to say that by the time I was home, I think people were getting up for work! I can't wait for him to give me his invoice. I'm already thinking up all kinds of reason to delay his payment ... muahahahahahaha!
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