Hot take: Was the customer right to flip out over a 3 cent part, or was I being lazy?

Last Tuesday I was on a install job in a old house near Brighton. Had to swap out a toilet fill valve. Standard Fluidmaster 400A, takes maybe 15 minutes. I get the new one in, test it, works fine. As I'm packing up, the homeowner notices the old float arm I left on the counter. She asks if I'm gonna take it. I said nah, it's just trash. She gets all quiet and says she wanted to keep it as a spare part for her other toilet. I told her that model is discontinued and the new valve has a different design, so it wouldn't match anyway. She goes off, says I'm wasteful and that part could've fixed her other toilet's issue. I stood there thinking, lady, it's a 3 cent piece of plastic that won't fit anything you own. But she kept going on about how I should've asked before tossing it. My boss backed me up later, but I still wonder if I should've just handed her the stupid thing and avoided the fight. What do you think? Should I have offered it up, or was she overreacting over literally pennies?

2 comments

2 Comments

davis.olivia14h ago

The float arm is literally trash and she was just looking for something to complain about.

laura_black8h ago

Oh, I have to push back on that, @davis.olivia. Sometimes people call things "trash" when they just don't work for their specific situation, but the float arm actually does have some real uses if you know how to adjust it properly. The woman in the video might have been genuinely frustrated because the instructions that come with these things are never clear about the tension settings. If you set the float arm just a little too high or low, it'll either let the tank overflow or won't fill at all, and that's a pretty reasonable thing to get upset about. Just saying it's all complaining misses how many people struggle with the same setup issue.