This is Brian, owner of A-1 Mechanical. I will gladly & immediately respond to the foregoing inaccuracies, distortions, and omissions: 1.) Sunday morning, I am home waiting to watch the NFL playoffs. Snowed yesterday, and now it is cold and windy out. Get a call, they have no heat, off I go. Upon arrival, as I am taking off my snow covered boots to enter the apartment, tenant says, "Oh, don't bother, we have dogs and cats in here and the carpet is already dirty." As I remove the boots, I notice she is right, the room has large fecal stains on the carpet. It isn't dirty, it's disgusting. The reason the furnace will not come on is that someone has turned off the power disconnect switch on the wall beside the furnace. The furnace when powered up readily lights and cycles, but burns with a sickly yellow, uneven flame, and the pilot has been adjusted WAY too high---flame is about 5 inches tall, creating a trail of soot up the frount and out of the furnace cabinet and up the adjacent wall. owners to be billed $50 trip & diagnostic charge. quote: "and then made arrangements to come back at a later date to clean and service the unit more thoroughly." True that, and therein lies the rub. The apartment manager informs me that we must go over there only when someone is home, otherwise their dogs get nervous, chew things up, and vomit all over the place. OK. Can do. 2.) Schedules align a couple days later. We are instructed to show up at 2 pm, which we do, me and a helper. Now, that part about inadvertently using the shop vac without checking on the filter being in there is true. Turned it on, it was blowing dust out the exhaust, I noticed it right away and shut it off. Ran for only about 2 seconds, I guess. And, truth be told, it did make an impressive cloud. It was really windy out, so we opened the front and back doors and the rooms quickly cleared. So we went and picked up a Rainbow vacuum cleaner, dust free, and came right back and started cleaning. Of course we apologized, but the woman was so apoplectic with rage, acting out, stomping around slamming doors, she can hardly be blamed for not remembering. She told us I want you to leave now, and we did. And one won't have to ask me twice. The less I deal with the mentally ill the better off I am. She said she had OCD real bad, and I believe it. But I guess if she wants to spend the rest of her life cleaning up NON EXISTENT messes, that is her perogative. And, in truth, PER HER INSTRUCTION, I NEVER intended to go back there, ever again. But when the apartment manager called Sunday night saying they could not light the water heater, of course I went over and lit it, no charge. Just a part of our "non-apology" policy, making sure they got hot water... yeah, right. 3.) quote: "They returned a few days later to again attempt to fix the furnace" Against our better judgement, yes. The weather during this interval had turned warm, space heaters were in use, and the apartment was toasty. Hardly an emergency. We still faced the scheduling problem, getting over there during the limited times available when someone would be there. (Sure don't want any nervous vomiting dogs on our conscience.) 4.) "After working for a couple of hours, they left for lunch, and to pick up a part. They did not return for four days or make an any effort to contact us to make arrangements for another return.* Now this is utter fiction. The problem was that the filthy 40 year old furnace was just difficult to access, hard to take apart, and balky in the extreme. During our tepeated attempts at adjustment, the gas valve suddenly and inexplicably quit working. Fortunately for the owners, we had an exact replacement for that old antique oddball, used, which we provided, installed, and adjusted free of charge. Before we left, we cycled the furnace on and off several times, probably half a dozen, to ensure it was working right, and it was. 4.) quote: " the furnace was returned to a functioning condition until 12" balls of fire came shooting out of it later that same night. They returned AGAIN the next morning," OK, she has got the timeline correct for once. To our utter chagrin, the furnace was now exhibiting delayed ignition, and was lighting with a pronounced "WHOOMP." Took it apart again, found no obvious problem, cleaned the burners again with special emphasis on the flame crossovers, and put it back together. Pretty worn- out old furnace, where the old burners easily get mis-aligned, in turn leading to rough lightoff was the root problem. Counted it out, as we then cycled it on and off exactly 10 times, and it lit off smoothly and cycled perfectly every time. Will it continue? Time will tell, I guess. But I suspect only one thing lasts forever. The pilot is now small, burning well with a clean blue flame. The burners have steady blue well-defined flames, and flue gas anaysis says 40 ppm CO in the vent...A-OK, clean, safe, efficient combustion. owners to be billed $75 for service call Now, as to the charge of leaving ashes in the kitchen sink, that seems possible. We did in truth clean a lot of the dirty, dusty, furnace parts with soap and hot water there in the sink, so perhaps we once failed to rinse the sink bottom out. Big deal, run the water for a second, unless one is in search of a suitable source/cause of grievous wounding, which I find to be exceedingly rare among the sane. So, in summation, the old furnace currently works very well, the dung-stained carpets were professionally cleaned, their rent was reduced for the month, and I gotta find an easier way to make $125, which they say any day will be forthcoming. And some spoiled little princesses are unhappy unless they are unhappy. C'est la vie! And if not us, then maybe next it could be the fault of the mail man, or the weather man, or perhaps Professor Plum in the Conservatory. Maybe she will lose her composure, wash her hands, then deck 'em after the job's done. Heck, that beats posting anonymous b.s. online any day of the week.