Another Reason Why I Should Just Do It Myself.

I got a repair call for a customer that was (thankfully) located close to my house.  When I got there and took a look at their system, I knew that it crashed and needed to be replaced.  The customer was understandably not happy about it especially because their one year factory warranty ran out just two weeks prior.

I called the owner of the company I was contracting out too and told him the system was dead and needed to be replaced.  After negotiations with the customer it was agreed that he would replace it with a refurbished model for $500.  I didn't think that was too bad of a deal at first but when I found out that he was going to downgrade them to a processor that was the lowest model that Avaya made it raised a red flag.  I need to point out that it's not my customer therefore it's not my business what this guy charges.

To make a long story short the 'refurbished' processor was bad and I had to drive back to his house and pick up another one.  That's the only reason that this job took two hours.  The labor involved two screws and plugging/unplugging five modular cords (those cords that go from the phone to the wall jack).  It took me 15 minutes to put the new system in and another 15 to program it.  

Now back to the why I got a red flag.  He charged this guy $275 labor!!

Let's do the math

$500 Total

-$50  Contractor charges (This is what I made off the job!)

-$0    Parts (there is no way he bought this as a factory refurb, it was used, period.)

$450 Profit

*sigh*