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He was up to something…
This morning a fellow called in and asked if I could do some work on his van by removing the company name and replacing it with a new name. The lettering on the van said the company was based in the West Midlands, and the fellow spoke with an irish accent
The van was pretty new with a very professional job done on the signs. But he wanted the old name removed and updated there and then. He wasn’t fussy about how it would look, as long as the name was changed.
I told him I was too busy to do it today, but could do it next week. He offred me cash to do it straight away and I declined. He then asked me how to remove the old lettering himself. Then he asked me if he could hire my equipment (hot air gun/wallpaper stripper) to take the signs off himself.
I refused, and he left.
I am left wondering what he was up to??
Any theories?
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7 Replies
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is this the kind of chap that would carry dags in the back of his van instead of dogs?(just a guess)
beware of the 2 lots of keys scam
ie you do the vinyl job on the side of the van and park it up waiting for your customer with his dag to arrive, when all of a sudden the van drives off leaving you with a nice set of keys as payment for the van 🙂
feckin dags
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Was the company anything to do with either
Landscaping.
Tarmac.
UPVC windows /cladding.We get alot of “travellers” asking for Hi viz vest lettered up.
So far I`ve been asked to.
Put other well known companys logos on the vests.
I sat there while a chap thought of a company name.
I`ve been asked to remove lettering I had done 6 months earlier, and letter it with a completly differant comapny name. Going from UPVC to landscaping.)
I`ve even been asked to put the local council logo on a vehicle.These are the “cowboys” from hell we see on the telly. They travel from one area to another. Doing crap jobs and then doing a runner. Changing thier name to put people off thier tracks.
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Very suspicious indeed
He could have nicked the van and wanted a quick fix to stop it being immediately identified.
He might have ended up down the road somewhere getting the number plates changed 👿 -
If you ever want to get rid of these type of “people”
just quote high and stick to that figure. And keep adding the VAT. That scares them off..
They don`t like paying top price.
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Kevin has probably got it about right, I did one of these a couple of years ago when I first started. The guy said his company name was duraclad which turned out to be a manufacturer of UPVC.
We did a cracking job on the van and a few days later he came in with an A board for us to letter. Did the A board but he never came back for it so it just sat in the lobby. About 4 months later a chap came in having seen the board through the window and asked if we knew how to contact Mr Duraclad, turned out this guy was a debt collecter and Mr Duraclad had left a trail of unpaid suppliers and had been collecting deposits off people and then not turning up to do the job.
Felt a bit guilty about giving him such a professional image but I wasn’t to know at the time.
There is a van knocking about cowdenbeath at the moment (we didn’t do it) with euro-cell plastics on the side, this is another manufacturer of UPVC so there must be a few of them at it. -
Good guess Kevin and Martin, it was a conservatory/upvc cladding company. I wish I’d taken note of the original company name on the van. 😕
My thoughts at the time were he was probably cheating someone somewhere out of money so I did not wish to help him do this. If he was genuine, waiting a few days would not have been a problem. It was the urgency of it all that concerned me.
Having said all that he was extremely polite throughout, and even thanked me for my time as he left.
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You did the right thing Phil, sounds very dodgy that.
We are quite lucky as we don’t get asked by the travelling caravan dwellers for signs (putting it politely). The one time I was approached I doubled the cost that I would normally charge, with a smile of course, I never heard off him again.
Hopefully the word gets about in the travellers community that we are to f*****g expensive 😎Cheers
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