I am quite a meticulous pedant, but my spontaneous thought on your heating coil thread was that there are still details even I would forget to put on a gold scale. By the way, my partner is a trained watchmaker and lives in an apartment with underfloor heating, from which he wouldn’t have asked for the installation plans even if he had been the first occupant. He just complains every year that he has to move a cabinet to get to the meters.
How do you even talk to the craftsmen (or do you just email)? — I know the phenomenon of people taking things the wrong way: for me, it’s often because you don’t hear the Berliner accent when writing. Maybe your heating guy has simply developed a Prenzlschwaben allergy.
Then you’re probably not often in the heating section of the forum, right? I found my thread still quite tame there compared to, for example, the Brötje thread or others...
But yes, I also strongly suspect that the heating guy just isn’t interested in concerned laypeople and wants to push through his scheme.
I have in fact mainly communicated by email. But there are basically two reasons for that:
1. The man is simply almost never reachable by phone.
2. I have adopted this in business relationships at some point because I tend to forget things I wanted to address during conversations. When I write, I can always re-read what I wrote before sending it to see if everything is complete.
I actually always make sure to phrase things even overly politely because I know from work experience about the limited non-verbal communication abilities of this medium.
Do you mean that this might have had the opposite effect? So instead of writing "would you please," I should have said, "Just do it this way, now!"?
Unfortunately, that’s a statement only the general contractor (GU) can make for themselves. With a shell or mailbox general contractor, you always have to expect that this statement does not also apply to each of their craftsmen.
There’s something to that, but on the other hand, I would expect that a GC/General Contractor who puts that on their flag also communicates that to their subs accordingly and selects their subs based on that.
Regarding the work ethic topic in general: I am somewhat surprised why such a reaction occurs from a customer who takes an interest in their own topic. When I still worked in customer service, I was always happy when a customer bombarded me with questions because it was exactly then that I could really live out my passion for my job and the industry. Consultation talks, planning drafts, etc. were what I liked best; I even liked processing complaints because it often involved finding the error first. Receiving orders and providing delivery time information just bored me.
Too bad.
P.S.
The heating guy met me personally, and I think, although I’m not a real Berliner, he did not put me into the Prenzlschwaben drawer (I’m also neither Swabian nor Bavarian). During the conversation, the chemistry was actually quite good.