In article . com,
RicodJour wrote:
A guy I used to work with told me a story about a friend of his that
had a carpet business. The guy got sick of having the exact scenario
you described happen to him. Someone would take his written estimate,
with room measurements, and shop it around. In other words this guy
was doing the estimating work and people were taking advantage of
him. Know how he fixed that? He started deducting 2' from every
dimension on the written estimate. He actually had an owner call him
up screaming that his measurements were wrong! The owner had given it
to some other guy who never bothered checking the measurements,
ordered the carpet, went to install it and...oops!

There are a couple of problems with that. First, if I got back the
written estimate from the carpet guy and it said my living room is 2'
shorter than it really is, I'd notice, and eliminate that carpet guy
from consideration, because I'd assume he is simply not competent to use
a measure, and so would not want him anywhere near my house.

Second, in this age of the internet, I'd probably blog about him, by
name, so that other people looking for a carpet guy would have a chance
of finding out that he can't even measure right.

Producing incorrect work is generally a bad thing to do, regardless of
whether it is on accident (because of incompetence) or on purpose (as
part of some sort of plan to keep people from using your work without
paying), because to the consumer of your work, the two cases are usually
indistinguishable.


--
--Tim Smith