Pau da battle. It’s over. I contacted Company #1 again and asked to speak with the owner. “Let me see if he’s here”, I was told. Three minutes later: “He’s stepped out for a few minutes.” Yeah, right. The guy asked if he could help me, and I told him that I want to bring back the thermostat and get a refund, that I didn’t want to leave negative reviews online, but $464.00 is a lot of money to us, and I said that we’d been long-term customers. and I wanted to get this whole thing resolved pleasantly for all of us. I told him that our old thermostat was working just fine, and if the tech who came out had checked the heating vents he would’ve seen that the pump itself was the problem, not the thermostat. He told me that he’d have the owner call me.

Guess what? The owner never did call me. No surprise there. So then I had to decide what the heck I was going to do next. But you guys, my life is full of all kine stuffs. I’m working, I go to the gym, I manage everything at home, have groups and people I need to stay in contact with…on and on it goes. I don’t have a lot of free time. And I’m doing a lot of grief processing, as well. I didn’t have a whole lot of emotional energy left for this kind of carp. Okay, crap. But I also wasn’t prepared to have all that money go down the drain, either.

Then last Friday, to my surprise, a check came from them. For $464.00? Nope. For $250.00, with a big note on it saying it was for the thermostat, but not for the labor. Watdaheck! $214.00 for labor? Not even close. But you know what? I had to consider my emotional/mental wellbeing in all of this. I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about it, wondering what I could do, hooking in to my inner tita, and during the day thinking about it a lot. So after talking with Nolemana about it, I decided that being in an ongoing beef with them wasn’t worth it. I just don’t have it in me. It wasn’t an easy decision. I’m big on justice, and this doesn’t feel like justice to me. But at this point, I think that my peace of mind is more important than justice. I still have the thermostat, which hopefully I can sell and make up a little bit more of what we’ve lost.

So yesterday I deposited their check. $200.00 +/- is a lot of money to us, and it made me mad to lose it. But you know wat? As soon as I deposited the check, I felt really peaceful about the whole thing. Well, maybe small kine pissed off, but mostly peaceful. I tried very hard to be pono (fair, upright) throughout all this. I never yelled, I was never rude, and I was never mean. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to write in an online review (and maybe that also wouldn’t be worth it), but for now, I’m pau. Done.

I so appreciate all you guyses support through this whole saga. You really did help me from feeling alone in this, and you had some great suggestions. Mahalo nui loa!