Even though I work from home and don’t have to take off work when I have contractors at my house, it doesn’t make the experience less stressful. I’d rather feel confident that I can easily follow an electrician around the house if it’s the first time they have been here, but that’s hard when you’re working during their visit. The last time I had a plumber at my house, they didn’t finish all of the tasks that we had agreed upon in our initial estimate and price quote. I made the dumb mistake of not inspecting all of the work before giving the plumber payment for their services. What good is it to just leave a bad review on the internet when they’ve already got your money? Some people are willing to leverage their reputations if it means making quick and easy money, so it’s not always going to have an effect that isn’t merely trivial. When it came time to hire a company for a new air conditioner, I thought that I did my due diligence in scouring the internet for reviews when comparing the four companies I had to choose from. Here I was assuming that I had found the perfect HVAC company simply because all of their reviews were positive. But I should have seen a red flag when I noticed that they only had a handful of reviews to begin, much fewer than any of their competitors. I found out later that it was a company that had changed their name a handful of different times. If the HVAC company had changed hands with each name change, it would make sense. Instead, they would create a new company name after so many bad reviews from ripping people off and taking their hard-earned money.