The business and billing practices of Fire Guard Sprinkler were so unethical!!



I called them for an emergency service in a Saturday morning last summer as Fire Guard is the designated contractor of our building. The sales



technique that the owner of Fire Guard, Walter Sr., was quite questionable. He indicated that our building owner was able to share some financial



burden of that service, and during the whole conversation, he had never given me a quote of the service, this misled me to believe that building owner



would take care of the bill or it's just a few hundred dollars of work due to the business relationship with our building. I didn't have much choice as



it was weekend and water was leaking from the ceiling, so I asked them to come. The contractor that Fire Guard sent spent literally 15 minutes to fix



the sprinkler, and wasted much more time on making private phone calls. How much they billed me at the end? $1123 for 4 hours of work due to weekend



overtime. That's $211 per hour of labor! A big ripoff!! And when did I get this invoice? Two days after the service!! Prior to that, I was never



given any figure about the cost for the service.



The lesson that I had learnt was that:

- The owner of Fire Guard is sly as a fox. He put me in situation as if I had an open check so he took advantage of it.

- Always assume the full financial responsibility for a service so you will try to figure out as much as you can about the cost.

- Get a quote before starting the service. However, this could be very tricky, I gurantee that a sales sly as a fox will tell you that they can't give



you a quote until technician is there to estimate the work, but when the technician arrives, it already costed you 2 hours of labor. Will you still opt



for another vendor? Very unlikely.

- Being that said, I'm sure that there are other vendors which run business in much more ethical manner.





In conclusion: If you leave any chance to Fire Guard, they will take a big bite on you!