I had a friend, now an ex-friend, who has some sort of mental disability. My amateur diagnosis is that she is ADHD and also suffers anxiety and fear as well as lack of ability to think clearly and analyze situations objectively. These problems drive her toward distrust of others.
She has an old Victorian house, an old Victorian commercial building, and a couple of old Victorian rentals, all purchased as gut rehabs. Getting these former wrecks habitable has been the work of her life and in doing so she has hired many, many workmen--plumbers, electricians, floor guys, stonemasons, brick masons, painters, etc.
So for some years I watched the parade of workmen stream through her houses and invariably she fired 90% of them. And somehow she always owed them money, which she never paid. During that period DH went into the handyman/small construction business and worked for her. But knowing her habits, he told her he would work for her on a "time and materials" basis. And he got to see first hand how utterly crazy she was in dealing with workers.
He would make arrangements to go to her house to work on the staircase. He would arrive there with appropriate tools. She would say--No! We are working on tile in the upstairs bathroom today. So he would go home, get tools, and go back. But since he was working on her dime that wasted time wasn't a big deal. Except that after a while he grew tired of the inherent inefficiency of her approach to the work. She would, literally, tell him to do X one day. Then the next day tell him to tear it out and do Y. And often she dictated the methods of doing the work which were sloppy and unprofessional. Finally he stopped working for her, but they parted friends and she owed him no money because DH was too smart for that.
So one day she asked, as she always did, for our recommendation for a painter. I gave her the name of my exterior painter but also called him to warn him how difficult a customer she was. He started a job for her, she pulled her usual "you aren't doing this work correctly/you are screwing me over/I will not pay you!" routine. Fortunately, he had all of his paperwork handy, she had signed a contract, and he took her to court. He won, YAY!
Now you would think that at that point I would drop her. But I am an idiot. Some months went by, she needed another painter. I gave her the name of the painter we used on another one of our projects and we liked him a lot. Same deal happened, she accused him of poor quality work and refused to pay him, but fortunately he had been warned by us about her and she owned him very little.
It was at that point that I dropped her as a friend. What an idiotic woman. She genuinely thinks that she is being "screwed" by the tradesmen.
Yet in her personal life she IS getting screwed, year after year, by supporting a young man who is unrelated to her, who does not work, hasn't worked for a decade, who stays home playing video games and eating. She's has a mother/son relationship with him only she's not able to get him out of the house.
This is a lot of crazy. I feel sorry for tradesmen who wander innocently into it.
