CAL PRO POOL SVC

When we hired Cal Pro Pool Service in June 2006, we emphasized that we would like our service visit to occur on a regular schedule during the week so that we would know in advance when we would be able to use our back yard and pool in privacy. Allen Clark, the owner of Cal Pro Pool Service, agreed initially to keep to a regular schedule and to call us if he needed to deviate from that schedule. However, this arrangement soon fell apart, and it got to the point where we never knew whether Allen was going to be servicing our pool on Wednesday, on Thursday, on Friday, or even on Saturday. Would he come in the morning? In the afternoon? Or even during the dinner hour? We never knew for sure. In addition, we started having concerns that Allen was not showing up at all on certain weeks, since we had not seen his truck in our driveway, there was no ?door hanger? left in place, and the skimmer baskets for our pool were full of leaves. However, Allen vehemently denied these absences. Allen usually kept our pool very clean, but we were troubled by having to wonder every week when (or if) he was going to show up. Also, we happened upon several problems (e.g., large water leaks in our pool equipment, noisy and failing booster pump) that Allen neither brought to our attention nor made any attempt to repair. On one occasion, we paid Allen an extra fee to install what we thought was a new salt-water filter, but we later found that he had actually installed a different of kind of filter. We would also have to mention an occasional tendency on Allen?s part to react in a defensive, even angry manner when confronted with something he interpreted as criticism ? not, in our view, the most enjoyable form of customer relations. It was rather frustrating as well when nearly every one of the phone messages we left with Cal Pro Pool Service went unreturned. With Cal Pro, every call was directed to voice mail, and voice mail was usually where our communication efforts ran aground.