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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Shout Out

I'll be the first to admit that I can be tough on local business people who I don't feel try hard enough to get my business. Maybe too tough at times. Regardless, I want take a moment to praise a local business person who did a good job, on time, for a competitive price. In short, he did his job and did it well.

I've had this on-going saga with a tree in my side yard. It has had some dead and dying limbs on it that I've wanted to cut off for the past three years. Three of them hang over my phone lines and every winter I think it is just a matter of time before I lose phone and internet service.

I've considered trimming the tree myself, but it is a good 25-feet tall, and like I said, it hangs over the phone line. I just had this feeling I would end up taking out the phone line and maybe end up in the ER in the process. The scenario that played in my head was me falling off a ladder as the vibration from cutting cracked the dead limb and then I would take out the phone line as me, the limb and the ladder crashed to the ground.

The tree has a main trunk that goes up about 4 feet and then 6 or 8 main branches branch off of that. Each main branch is 6 to 8 inches in diameter and goes up another 10 to 20 feet. Two of these branches were denuded and another was close to rubbing against the house when it blew in the wind. All three of these hung over the phone line.

About five years ago, when two of them started to lose leaves, I took some aircraft cable and tied all of the branches together. I'm not sure if this helped to keep the branches from breaking off, but it helped me sleep at night when we had one of our big winter storms. About 3 years ago I started to call people to see about having the tree trimmed. This usually started in October when the weather started to change and I realized another year had passed with out me dealing with this.

I was amazed out how difficult it was to get someone to do the work. It was usually one of 3 scenarios. They would show up to give an estimate, but then not return calls to do the work. They would show up to give an estimate and say my only choice was to cut the whole tree down. The worst, was when they wouldn't show up at all. After three years I was running out of people to call.

This year I started at it again. I had a promising tree trimmer who came out and looked at the tree, but that only started a 6 week odyssey of phone tag. No matter how many times I gave him my cell phone number he would call my home phone while I was at work. The last time I called I did nothing by repeat my cell phone number several times and he never called back at either number after that.

On Tuesday I called Steve at Eager Beaver and left a message. He called me back a few hours later on my cell as he was standing in my front yard. We talked about what I wanted and he made a few suggestions. I said sounds great, how much. He gave me quote. I asked if he wanted a deposit. He said no, he would just leave an invoice in my mail box. I asked when he could do it and he said Thursday.

I came home today for lunch and there was Steve parked out front with a wood chipper on the back of his truck grinding up the last of it. The limbs had already been cut off and the tree looked great. We chatted for a minute and I went in for lunch. Twenty minutes later I heard the chipper shut off so I went out and confirmed the price. The yard looked great. The tree was trimmed. I handed him a check.

He even took in the slack on the aircraft cable so it is still in place holding everything together, just in case. If the tree does need to come down at some point, I know who I'll call.

Steve
Eager Beaver Tree Service
707-444-7333

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