Diary of a Working Married Mother: Shoddy work will haunt you 

We have been doing some repairs and modifications around our house. Some of that work was long overdue, but because of busy work schedules and the lack of enough funds, we kept postponing this assignment.

My husband and I are so different in the way we handle workers. He easily trusts people and gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. I am always skeptical about what workers promise they can do.  Having been disappointed too many times, this is my default position. One of the men we had hired is a plumber we have known for years. Considering the nature of the job and the remuneration involved, I imagined he was happy to get the call. The assignment was supposed to be completed before Easter holiday.

My husband paid the plumber in advance for most of the required materials. The job took longer to get done than the assurances we got. But that was not the biggest problem.

Two days after completion of the plumbing works, we got a fault we had never had before. The plumber was slow in returning to fix the problem and when he did fix it, he said it was just a loose connection and it would not reoccur.

That was a couple of days before Easter Sunday. But he was wrong. By Wednesday this week, it had not been fixed. First, he would not pick calls and then he switched his phone off.

Building trust with existing clients in order to get repeat business or referrals to other clients takes time and quality work.  This is something many small and medium business owners in Uganda do not comprehend.

 A typical businessman in the banana republic has an inflated sense of self entitlement-we owe it to them to give them jobs so they can survive. Unfortunately, we do not owe them anything – unless,  of course, they do a good job.

It is painful to spend hard-earned money on someone who will not do a good job. We are considering different options of action to take against this plumber, but if past experiences are anything to go by,  he will not take any lesson from this.

I always tell my boys that when they are given an assignment, they should do it to the best of their ability or not do it at all. That shoddy work will come back to haunt you and you will lose the little you had in the first place.