I was wondering how many of you get third party service calls? This is where someone in an office somewhere sets himself up as a service provider and sells maintence contracts all over the country. When calls are made, they find a local who they will hire to do the call for preset amounts. In the past it was a good source of extra money, but I recently had to do a couple for a rather small amount of money. My boss did not want the competition to do them, so I fixed an HP plotter for $45. That was not too bad, because it took me 20 minutes and was in the middle of my territory, so no travel time. A week later I get another call. This one was 50 minutes one way to get there. These people do not pay extra for travel. As I do the call in procedure to tell them this old laser jet 4 needs a fuser, I am reeding the paperwork that came with the call and it says if I have to make a second trip, they will pay $25 for this one for our expenses. It was 50 min out there and 50 min back to the shop. When they found out that UPS would not deliver to the site because of how remote it was, they wanted me to go pick it up, for no extra money of course, which I refused to do. I did go back and put it in, because I like the customer. The customer had a Konica color copier, about 8 years old. She told me that one time they called a work order in, and a TV repair man drove from South Carolina, which was another 2hours south of my shop, and he blew canned air into the machine, told them not to do it, and left. They did finally get a real tech on the copier after a few calls. Do any of you take these low paying calls?
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