So I’m a self-employed general contractor. I got a job to redo the plumbing system in a customer’s house and asked my dad to help me with it since it was a two-man job and he’s been a plumber for 40+ years.
This morning the customer called to say that last night a loose fitting came off and completely flooded their utility room. They were able to shut off the water immediately and sweep/wet-vac the floors, and it looks like there was no permanent damage other than to my pride.
The thing is, the joint that failed was done by my dad. My customer doesn’t know - I took full blame - but I feel like I don’t want to tell my dad either, and here’s the problem. I’m very big on honesty and I feel like I should tell him, or at the very least that I’d want to know if I was in his shoes. I just don’t know what it achieves other than making him feel bad about it too. I don’t want this to be the first thing that pops into his head the next time I ask for his help. I’d wish to keep this a good memory.
I’m torn here. I know my intentions are good, but I’m not sure whether I’m actually protecting his feelings or my own.
Decenter yourself and your relationship from this scenario just for a moment, is this information that your (coworker maybe in this case?) needs to know in order to do a better job in the future? How would you go about informing them if so. Then you can bring back in all the other variables before figuring out your next step. Perhaps you can also frame the information you have differently to allow them to put together the other details “last job there was a leak, was there something we overlooked?” Or smth idk
Blame the tools lol
Even better