Cowboys and the revenge of the small, frail, white-haired senior citizen...

Older ladies still like to control certain aspects of the running of the home - this includes the maintenance of household fabrics such as curtains and carpets - they probably had a big say in what was purchased new and they have a say in how these things are maintained.


I met just such a lady recently in somewhat unusual circumstances as out of the blue we got a call from a small, white-haired (as it turned out) pensioner who wanted our advice. I took the call and discovered that she had had a visit from a 'splash and dash merchant'. She was upset and she wanted to know if there were any good guys out there in planet carpet clean.


I said I thought there were plenty and many of them like us are truck mounted operators. I suggested we could try to fit the bill for her. She asked if we could rectify the mess left by the cowboy operator as she was now faced with no option as the 'rootin-tootin' bunch had declined a re-visit to clear up their own mess.

The Rootin tootin gang

She had got through to the boss who said she had obviously had the wrong sort of carpet clean and she should have had a 'proper job' which (you'll never guess) cost considerably more than the cheap price the girl had offered her on the phone for the basic job.


Apparently (as she told me) the company's telephone sales operation had called her five times in total before they had got her to agree to the visit and when she gave in and invited them in, the cowboy tried to upsell the touted price in a classic case of 'bait and switch'.


She had refused to be upsold and although she had only wanted them to do her stairs and tiny hall - most of the latter covered by a runner - the clown had said he would do three rooms (hall and stairs being two of these rooms - yeah go figure that one) and an upstairs bedroom which she said didn't need doing but he insisted!


Well the upshot was the bedroom was not dirty so he could not make a mess of that but the stairs and hall at the foot of the stairs were left looking worse than before with dirt being drawn somewhat out of the carpet and then left on the surface in a muddy, soapy slurry that was pooled at the foot of the flight and smudged down the risers and nosings on the stairs themselves.


Now she had a surprise for the company in the form of son who is a solicitor and therefore has plenty of free legal advice to offer and to enable her to mount a county court action to recoup her money and claim for the extra costs of putting the problem right.


We went in with the appropriate level of genuinely powerful steam cleaning and remedied the job to a standard that the cowboy/clown could not have achieved in a month of Sundays.


We priced our job properly and charged a resonable price for a good job done. The cowboys wanted her to buy something she had not wanted and she had been tempted by the cheap offer of three rooms for a very low price and then when she refused to play their game had simply done a quick, rubbish job and dashed off to fleece someone else - just the sort of conduct that gives the trade a bad reputation.Thanks guys.


I am sure you are about to see that small, frail ,white-haired lady in court. Yippee ky ay...


www.SteamCleanCarpetService.co.uk