Who is this Guy?

There is someone following me around. He may be following you, too! I don't know what he looks like, where he is from, what his name is, or any other personal information. But I do know what he does.... he follows me around. He seems to be everywhere I am, lately. He follows me and he knows if I am about to make some money. His main job is to prevent me from making money.

He was there the other day. We had just finished installing some doors at a house. I checked out the doors, they worked perfectly. In fact, the client kept opening and closing the doors and admiring the way they worked. He said they were the only two doors in the house that worked right. I got paid and sent my help on to the next job. About 15 minutes later, this client called and said that the locks on one of the doors didn't work right. So I called my installer and told him to go back to make the correction. He got just about back to the house and the client called again and said he was sorry, but he had a twig jammed in the door. Everything is all right now. Ya, everything is alright except for the hour I had to pay my installer to go back. That sapped 33% of the profits out of that job. The invisible follower was there.

Then there was the plumbing job. This was a real simple faucet change out. I was giving the elderly lady a break on the price. So my plumber had to shut off the main water valve to the house because their was no shut off at the bathroom vanity. The lady wanted shut-off valves under the sink so that it would now meet code. So my plumber cut the pipe for compression fittings, except, oops, what looked like a half inch pipe was actually not half inch. And now we discovered that the main shut-off didn't totally shut the water off. So now we had running water with no way to shut it off, because he had no part with him that fit. So, off to the plumbing shop he went. They didn't have the part and sent him to another plumbing shop. Who didn't have the part, so they made one. So, guess who was at the house emptying the bucket every couple of minutes. You got it, I was! Guess who was paying the bill for all the trips to the plumber? Yours truly. When my plumber finally returned and resumed his work, I left explaining that it was my wife's and my anniversary and that the plumber would finish up in just a little while. So, on my way to the dinner date, I called to plumber. He assured me that all was well.... he was making the last solder. Cool. All this was on Friday. On Sunday, I called my plumber to see how it all turned out. He said he didn't finish because the running water prevented him from soldering, so he got compression fittings to stop the water flow and on Monday he will finish. So all embarrassed over this, I called my client to apologize and let her know that she wouldn't be charged. She told me I was "one in a million."  Sometimes I'd rather be just like everybody else. I can just see this invisible guy snickering at me. I hope he gets a toothache.