That client who kept calling about the same oak tree finally made sense

A woman three blocks from me rang me up every month for a year asking if a big red oak in her yard was dying. I kept telling her it was fine, just old. Then last spring a branch came down in a storm and split her fence. She called me out with a check already written and a quote from someone else for removal. I finally realized she wasn't being paranoid, she just wanted me to see what she saw from her kitchen window. Has anyone else had a customer who was right about a tree that looked okay from the street?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_angela26d ago

Yeah that's the thing with oaks ... they look solid from the road but rot can hide inside the trunk for years. I've learned the hard way that if a client is calling every month, they're seeing something from their porch that I'm missing from the truck. Now I always ask them to show me exactly where they stand when they look at the tree.

lee.casey26d ago

That lady was patient though. My neighbor had a silver maple that looked totally fine from the sidewalk but the trunk had this big hollow spot you could only see from their back deck. I told them it was probably okay since the canopy was full. Then a microburst came through and that tree just snapped in half like a toothpick. Their carport got crushed. I felt terrible for brushing them off. Sometimes you gotta walk the whole property and look at things from the same angle they do every morning.