I remember thinking something about the address and then dismissing it because I knew I’d left it. When I called to see if he was able to finish the work he said he had but when I got home  I realized he hadn’t done the work. Hmm. What went wrong? When I called to say he must have gone to a different apartment we discovered he wrote down the address of my neighbor by accident. He said that while he was here he thought it was odd because the sink wasn’t that bad off,  there was no leak in the tub and the key was under a rooster, not a pot. With that many details off maybe he should have called me while he was here? It would have saved him a time and money.

It is so important to follow-up and ask questions especially when your intuition tells you that something just isn’t right – that the information just isn’t adding up. Sometimes clients get defensive or shut down and it is difficult to get the information you need to do your job. That is unfortunate. However, it isn’t an excuse for not getting what you need up front to do a great job. In this case it was just a reminder to me. I’ve been in that place, where I just pushed through a job even though something was off – that never works.  Always ask if things don’t seem right. Information, like sinks, wants to flow, (as Chris Anderson discusses in his book “Free”) you’ll end up unclogging much more than a sink.