Rick Mick Plumbing

Frustrating to no end that I could never get a straight answer from contractor about whether he had finished work or not. (It's clear now that he never did; keep reading). Rick called me last Thursday to say that the work he'd agreed to do was finished. I drove over to the job site and wrote him a check. Then, when I asked him for the house key back, he told me he needed to hang onto it because he wasn't done the work yet. Rick was totally rude and brusque during the whole surreal exchange. It was like we were working for him. Work was done on a newly bought house which no one was residing in. Rick Mick called on Thursday to ask owner to come pay him because, he said, work was finished. I asked Rick if he had, as we asked him to, checked for a leak from the shower in master bath onto the first floor, a leak identified pre-purchase in the official inspection report. Rick said he had not. Over the phone, I reminded him he'd said he'd do that. And I read to him the section from the inspection report about the leak. I asked Rick if he could please turn the shower in the master bath on and leave it on for 1/2 hour (which is what inspector did to find leak) and he said he would. I told him I would meet him at house in 1 hour. When I got to house an hour later, Rick was not there (even though he told me that's where he was calling from an hour before). After about 15 minutes he showed up. I asked him if he had run the shower yet to check for leak and he said he had not but "didn't think there was a leak coming from master bath." "Based on what?", I asked. "I just don't think there is," Rick said. "It could be coming from anywhere." I then asked Mick to show me how he had fixed the shower head that had not not spouting water. He turned it on and a trickle came out (no exaggeration; nothing close to a shower spray came out of the head; it was not much water coming out and barely enough volume to wet your toothbrush on). He said that was the best it was going to get and "that's the way these multi-head showers always go." Which would have been good to know ahead of time, as we'd have asked him to install a new head, not try and fix the one that came with the house and which he now said that he knew beforehand wouldn't work right. I was flabbergasted. He was actually acting like he'd fixed it because he got it to "about as good as it was going to be." Fed-up, I wrote Mick the check and escorted him out of the house, locking door behind me. That's when the clincher came: Me: "Rick, can you give me back the key?" Rick: "Uh, no, I still need it because I am not quite done putting the rubber piece back on the shower. I'll call your wife and let her know where I leave it." It was a good thing for both of us that I had somewhere else I had to be. I'll follow-up with a p.s. post if we ever get a call back about the key.