I’ll Make You An Offer You Can’t Refuse… Or Fulfill

Sometimes, you wonder if customers live under a rock — or in a fairytale castle with invisible, magical servants, completely separated from the real world.

We are installing private photovoltaic (solar) systems and batteries. The customer can order from us, and we do everything possible to make the whole process as easy as possible for them. But it is still a construction project. You need the delivery and installment of the modules on the roof and the whole electrical equipment, and then you need to register it as is the law to do so. And, you know, you need to respect the laws of physics and nature, as well as transport through the real world, which is inhabited by other people.

Today, I had a lengthy discussion with a customer — and she is not the first one — concerning time slots. She wanted an exact time frame — a fixed time, like 9:00 am, for the start and a fixed time for it to be finished, like a guaranteed finish time of 4:00 pm, to plan her day. For delivery and installation! And no, she didn’t mean it should finish somewhere before that time; finishing earlier was also an outrageous idea to her! She wanted fixed times to the minute!

After much back and forth, she asked for the umpteenth time:

Customer: “I still can’t understand why you can’t just give me a time! Everyone else does. I think you should at least offer me compensation if I have to waste my time on this!”

I was exhausted by her unreasonable demands and attitude.

Me: “Mrs. [Customer], the reason that I can’t give you that exact time you want is that you knowingly ordered from a company located in Berlin while living in Leipzig. Those deliveries have to travel on the road — where other people travel, too — a distance that will take several hours to get to you. Other people exist, and no one can control them. An installation is a dynamic process; we cannot know if everything will go exactly as planned. You need to accept that it might take the whole day or might take half a day. There are too many factors to be able to make a definite schedule.

“But I’ll make you an offer. You do some research, and if you manage to find any official company offering logistics for businesses that guarantees a fixed delivery time, I’ll have my logistics specialist make a contract with them and we’ll halve your bill. If you then find any company that’ll give you, in writing, a guarantee that they’ll finish the installation with a fixed start time and a definite end time exactly as you demanded here, we’ll hand over the contract to them, but you’ll get everything for free.”

She huffed and puffed and said I’d see; she’d get that. I even gave it to her in writing.

Today, I finished the project and sent her the finishing papers. She paid in full.

It’s really hard to catch a unicorn when they don’t exist, isn’t it?