We make a point of really investigating our home owners before we start working for them and we also require a lot owed of them. Before I even come out here to sit with them, they’ve already gone through a process that we very specifically laid out that we need them to do before we’re even interested in talking to them. The big thing is they called office. If they’ve seen the website or haven’t seen the website, they’re always set to the website and there’s a follow-up call to see if we’re still right for them, if they’re still right for us.
By the time we get here, we have a pretty good indication that they are our type of people. Granted sometimes people might get through who said they did things, or maybe they did it but they don’t understand us. In this particular case, they very much understood who I was by the time I got here.
I made the joke that they have to strike against them because they were both engineers. Not that there’s anything wrong with engineers because without engineers, I couldn’t do my job. What I understand typically about engineers is they want to micromanage. I had made it clear that they had watched the video to show that I don’t like micromanaging. We’re going to have a real problem or you might as well not even get started if they’re going to micromanage.
What was really interesting with this couple was they were also do-it-yourselfers and this was the first project that they were going to pay to have done. To me, that was a little awkward thinking, “Oh, boy, how’s that going to go?” I was so comfortable with them that I knew it would be fine.
From an engineer, micromanaging standpoint, not at all. They were amazing. What happened was, we very much synchronized and there was a synchronicity thing almost. We just came together and it worked just right where they wanted to know enough, but didn’t need to know a lot. They let me just be creatively free. They tried to stay out of it in every place they could and not poked, or nosing too much, or asked too many questions.
In a matter of fact, the outstanding joke here was I had asked them to pick a tile sample from a couple different samples. They picked one. When I ordered it, the supplier ordered the wrong one. We brought it in, put it on, and they made a comment that I see it didn’t really pick ours, you picked yours. I had no idea that it was the wrong tile because the number I was given, I gave to the supplier and the supplier inverted it with one of the other numbers in that series. The tile is too perfect but it wasn’t the tile that they expected to go on their pool, but they trusted and believed in me enough.
If we’ve gotten the tile and it was the wrong tile for the pool by what I would require it looks wise, I wouldn’t have done it, but the tile that came was going to work with the look and the feel that we’re trying to get anyway. They instead of arguing about it and going through that whole process of special ordering again, they just let us do it. It was a mistake. It looked like I made the decision that I had not, but knowing that and that was fairly early on in the process I knew the rest of it would be really smooth because if they could let that go and not get too anxious about it and trust that I wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t going to work, then I knew we were going to have any problems. It turned out to be a thrill in the joy.
I want to come back here and continue to do things. I just put another thing on my list of something that I’m going to do because I want to, because it’s going to be ultra cool. It’s a cool relationship because, now, I want to just keep giving. There’s more things that I see that I want to do and I have other projects. I have other things to do but then there’s just longing artist part of me that wants to do extra stuff. That’s what happens when a relationship can go the way that it did at this project.
Music in the videos:
“Electrodoodle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/