Louie was scheduled to come out to inspect my exterior staircase yesterday afternoon. I got a call from LD Steel's main office around the time he was supposed to arrive and was told he had to cancel and reschedule for another day. As if I had nothing better to do with my time then take off from work and wait around for Louie, who decides at the last minute that he cant show up for an appointment, right? This should have been a red flag for me but I ended up rescheduling for today in the morning. Louie arrived on time and we discussed various options for fixing the existing outside staircase as opposed to replacing it altogether. Louie was using technical contractors jargon and rushing through things, not taking the time to adequately address all the finer details this project would involve...so I had to slow him down and point out things to him all along the way...the pros as well as the cons. He showed me pictures but they didnt show details up close and so they needed a little more explaining. Louie seemed easily flustered with me when I asked him to explain more in detail. He used a lot of technical jargon and kept skimming over details and I got the sense that a) he didnt have a good handle on what he was talking about or b) that he didnt know how to explain things to customers. For a project this big - a full exterior staircase and the only means of getting in and out of the house - it was important to address how this was gonna be done. Not to mention the price this would probably cost (somewhere in the neighborhood starting at $10,000). Louie was talking fast and skimming over a lot of details that needed to be addressed and I was trying to "S-L-O-W H-I-M D-O-W-N. I was feeling like he was flying by the seat of his pants and taking me along with him. The icing on the cake is when he got annoyed with me over not understanding his technical jargon regarding a "plate" that would be bolted onto the galvanized steel riser underneath the steps... and he got annoyed when I said it seems more like a "bar" of metal jutting out. He corrected me and said it was a "plate" and that this was the technical term. I said, okay so its a plate...its a plate with a bar projecting outward to attach to the stair railing post coming straight down from above (otherwise how in the world would these two pieces of metal attach to one another?). Technical terms aside, Louie couldn't explain properly how this worked to me. For this, he got annoyed, went into a hissy fit and walked off to his car, telling me that he couldnt talk to customers who didnt understand technical terms. Really, Louie? All the technical jargon in the world isnt gonna help you if you cant take the time to adequately explain how something works to a customer. If you get annoyed with customers over having to explain the details of a $10,000+ job then maybe you need to be in another business. read more