Being a family owned business for over 79 years, and in my 37 year tenure as president of this business, I have rarely run across a customer so rude and unresponsive to my attempts to communicate with them. Over a period of a month, I made numerous calls to her and left messages, which she would ignored for days. And some of these calls were regarding vitally important information I needed, in order to proceed with her roofing project. She only answered the phone one time when I initially called, the others were ignored for days. Her attitude seemed to be that she was a corporate executive and above taking calls from a roofing contractor. Our company did everything we could to make this customer happy. We even installed the upgraded GAF American Harvest Lifetime architectural shingle at the same price of the GAF Timberline HD shingle and met with her husband to help pick out the roof color. And yes, my crew did work late that Thursday evening, because rains were coming in from the remnants of hurricane Irma and we had to make sure this property was watertight. Something she never seemed to appreciate. I tried to call her that Friday to ask if there was anything she saw that we needed to tweak or address, but again, no response. So, I left another message and you guessed it - it was totally ignored. Since she never answered my daytime calls, I thought that maybe she was in business meetings during the daytime and could not respond, so my only alternative was to try her in the evening, so I called her that Sunday evening, but that was also fruitless. She only responded when she felt like it. I called on Sunday evening thinking that surely she was not in a business meeting and most likely at home. But, no answer. She later told me that she saw it was me calling but refused to take the call. And after trying to work with her for a month, I certainly was not "some strange man" calling. Well, what was my alternative? If she doesn't answer daytime calls and wont' take evening calls at home, just when was I suppose to discuss the job with her? This was the kind of attitude I had to endure for nearly a month. So, I emailed and texted her stating that I needed to speak with her asap. She finally did call on Monday around 1:00 p.m. and I told here I had been trying to contact her to see if there were any issues we needed to address and if not, how did she want to handle the final payment. I addressed any roofing needs first, before talking about payment. I certainly "did not" begin the conversation with a request for payment. That is totally untrue. However, she immediately went on the attack about me calling her in the evening and was very abusive and I was simply not going to be talked to in her condescending manner. She then denied having ignored my calls in the past and said she had always responded immediately to my calls, which was totally untrue. I said if she checked her cell phone, she would see just how many times I had tried to contact her, without a response. But she refused that request. And whatever the situation with her family health issues, she could have had her husband respond to my calls over the weeks I tried to contact her. I must believe that she was in contact with her husband during this time. Our telephone conversation escalated, as she insisted that she had promptly responded to my calls, and she said she would no longer communicate with me. So I asked her for her husband's telephone number and told her I would communicate with him in the future. But, she refused to give me his number. It was at that point that I told her that if I could not speak with her or her husband, then she would leave me no alternative but to put a lien on the property, until we could settle our differences and payment was made. At that point, she began to change her attitude a bit, when she realized that I did have some alternatives to deal with her unsavory attitude and that she did not have total control over this matter. She then began to declare that we had scratched the exterior of her kitchen window, destroyed all of her plants between the house and garage and left a wire hanging down from here roof. So, I immediately called my foreman and was informed that they had put a piece of plywood over the kitchen window and it was impossible for any shingles to have hit the window. However, I called the best glass repair company in Atlanta regarding the window and they were on the property in 2 hours making the repair. This company even repairs windows on Ferrari automobiles - I spared no expense in addressing this matter. However, it was interesting that this window expert told me that if the homeowner gave me a hard time about the window, that the inside of this kitchen window had many scratches on it and that the window glass had been abused in the past. This made me suspicious about her blaming us for the scratch, but I said nothing to her about this conversation. In addition, her statement about "having destroyed all of her plants between the house and garage" was also found to be a hyperbole. When I visited the property, I found that only 2 small secretia plants had been a little compressed by the tarp we had put over this area for protection and I offered to replace the two plants. She did have a wire hanging down from the front gutter, which services some sort of security system. I sent my men back to put the wire in the gutter and just go over the property again with blowers to make sure everything was in order. When we finished with these items I contacted her regarding payment. This was an insurance roof replacement due to storm damage and I emailed her a final invoice. On our first visit, I did tell her that we would ask for the first insurance check when the roof installation was finished and then wait for the balance due, after her insurance company had sent her the 2nd check. I had no idea about how much the insurance company paid her in the first check, so how could I have demanded $19,000.00 from her? Just another fabrication. I received the first check in the mail and waited a couple of weeks for the balance due our company, just as I had shared with her in our first visit. I regret that this project unfolded in this manner, but sometimes you just run into a homeowner with an attitude that is difficult to deal with. Lani Finley/President Finley's Roofing, Inc.