Morgan Friedman: Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m very excited to have Greg Digneo. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Greg Digneo: Yeah, you got it. Digneo. Yep.

Morgan Friedman: I get a gold star.

Greg Digneo: Yes, you did. Thank you.

Morgan Friedman: Retire now.

And I’m excited to have Greg here. We had a great get-to-know-you call recently, and so excited to hear this story. I have my coffee with whiskey in hand. I’m all yours, Greg.

Greg Digneo: So, this start—

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Where to start?

Greg Digneo: Okay. So, this story begins in like 2003, I want to say. So, I was either going into senior year of college or something like that. And my friend and I, we get the idea to start a solar panel company. We were going to install solar panels on other people’s roofs.

So, we get our start. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but one of our professors was like, “Hey, I want solar panels.” And the two of us were like, “We were looking to get something started.” So, we’re like, “Hey, we’ll put your solar panels on the roof.” We had no idea what we were doing, but he was willing to pay us. So, that’s how we got started.

Morgan Friedman: I love the spirit of jumping in.

Greg Digneo: Yeah. We just kind of just raised our hand and we’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do it for you. Sure.”

I mean, at the time we got paid more money than we’d ever seen in our kind of lives because it was—the way the whole thing was structured, there was like a lot of rebates and state incentives to do it. And so, like, we would just tack on money on top of that and we made like $10,000 or something like that.

And again, for 21, 22-year-old kids, that money—that was more than we’d ever seen.

And so we were like, “Yeah, we’re going to do a solar panel installation,” which was fantastic.

So then we got another job. Another professor wanted the solar panels. And then somehow we got to our third client, our third customer. And I don’t remember how we acquired him or how he found us or how we found him.

My buddy Matt, who was my co-founder at the time, said, “Hey, Greg, I got a customer. You’re here. Let’s go check it out.” So, we go there and we’re checking it out, and the roof is perfect. The house is perfect. It’s a beautiful house.

We’re kind of going through and we’re just talking to the guy, and he starts to say some things that were a little bit weird to us. But we were, again, 21, 22 years old and we didn’t know any better.

Morgan Friedman: Give us some examples.

Greg Digneo: Yeah, sure. So, he would say something like—he had a floor in the garage that had a special paint on it that, I mean, he told us, that’s the floor that people that NASCAR garages use.

I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it was a very special paint and it was like scuff-proof paint, so the tires wouldn’t scuff the floor of the garage.

Again, whether NASCAR people have it, like, as you go, as we’ll see more and more, you’ll understand why I’m not so sure that’s the truth. However, I could tell you that it was a specialized paint and it was probably more expensive than, you know, your average paint or whatever kind of paint you want to use.

So, he was saying something along the lines of like, “Hey, see this floor? I got it for free because I sued the company because they weren’t doing a good enough job.” Or something along those lines.

And the two of us, we kind of just chuckled at it and laughed, and we were like, “All right, that’s weird but funny, whatever.”

Morgan Friedman: Okay.

Greg Digneo: And so, in retrospect, in retrospect, that’s when we should have walked away.

Morgan Friedman: 100%.

For our listeners, I just want to point out something that’s come up before on previous episodes. Every episode, I try to get at least one new lesson in, and we already have one.

On previous episodes, I’m like, it’s a red flag, or maybe a yellow flag, if a client is complaining about previous people who did the same job.

Greg Digneo: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Because if you hire one marketing firm, they’re terrible, then another terrible, then another terrible, it’s not that every marketing firm in the world sucks. It’s that you are terrible—unrealistic expectations.

But what’s new here is that he didn’t complain when he’s like, “Yeah, I sued them.” That’s like a whole other level of intensity.

Greg Digneo: Yep.

So he sued the company and got the floor done for free. And again, we didn’t know any better. We were young and dumb, and again, we were making $10, $15, $20,000 a job. Like, we’re not going to turn down that money.

So we kind of just shrug it off. We laugh, we chuckle, we shrug it off. But I’ll never—but again, for as long as I live, I’ll never forget the fact that he talked about suing another service provider the first day we met him.

And so that was like the very first red flag that we had.

There were a couple others. I don’t remember the exact timeline because, again, this was 22 years ago, but I—so another thing that happened was he had photographs. He talked about being—at the time, DSLR cameras were all the rage and super expensive because I remember DSLR.

This is pre-iPhone, so we had a DSLR camera with like a telephoto lens and things like that, and we were walking around the house one time and he was showing us the pictures that he was taking.

And one of the pictures that he said, like, he won an award for, it was a picture that he, quote unquote, claimed to have taken in Norway.

And I looked at the picture and it’s like, I can’t explain it, but I knew I saw the picture before. It’s a famous painting of like this bay in Norway that everybody had seen.

If you Google like “famous painting” or “famous portrait of Norway” or something like that, you’ll know what I’m talking about and you’ll see it. And I had seen this before.

Even like, I guess maybe he didn’t know people like had Google Image. It wasn’t a thing. The internet wasn’t a thing at the—it wasn’t a big thing at the time, but like the internet was still a thing then.

But again, I kind of dismissed it and I was like, “That’s weird. I think I’ve seen this painting before.”

I’m not an art expert or anything like that, but like this—this looks—or sorry, not this painting, this picture. Like, I think I’ve seen this picture before.

And so, you know, we were working that day or whatever we were doing the install that day, and then one of us goes through the internet and we look up the guy’s name.

And I’m not going to tell you the guy’s name, but we go through, we look up the guy’s name, and in one of the things that we found—I don’t remember if it was a forum or a newspaper clipping or something—but there’s this picture on the internet and the guy is claiming, “Hey, I won an award for this picture. It’s a famous picture,” blah blah blah.

And then right under it, there’s a message, something along the lines of, “You will hear from our attorney, as this picture is a proprietary picture,” or portrait, or something like along those lines. Or this picture is copyrighted or whatever the terminology was.

So, yeah, so that was like another red flag. Again, I don’t remember exactly when that red flag was. And then, like, those were like two things that I just vividly remember, and yeah, throughout the thing.

Morgan Friedman: Just want to make the point that it’s incredible how people who lie and make up—they lie and make up on the things that are so easy to prove them false.

Greg Digneo: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: And it’s like, you don’t even try. Take an obscure photo, not a famous one.

Greg Digneo: Yeah. It’s like, honestly, for your audience, Google “famous painting of Norway,” and it’s going to be one of the two or three that comes up.

That was one of the things that just kind of—just super, super weird.

And again, we shrugged it off, but I think at that time we were in the middle of the job and we’d already received money. So, I don’t even know what we could have done regardless of that other than give them the money back and be stuck with all the inventory of solar panels.

So, we finished the job, and this—again, we finished the job up in 2003, and the next 17 years of our lives, we would hear from this man.

So, normally what happens is with a solar panel installation, you know, you finish the job.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah.

Greg Digneo: You finish the job with the client and like, you know, maybe I come out and you’re like, “Hey, Greg, could you just check on this?”

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. But—

Greg Digneo: Exactly. But most of the time I never hear from the person again.

We would hear from this man from like 2004 to 2008. We were hearing from this man four and five times a—

Morgan Friedman: A month, I’m sorry.

Greg Digneo: About once a week.

Morgan Friedman: Just about once a week.

Greg Digneo: Yeah. For about four years. And then it tapered off, and we would hear from him about like once every two, three months for the next like 10 years or so.

And let me go back really quick. The other thing that was really weird about this man was that we never saw him at a job. And we were working there on like a Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 or Thursday afternoon at 12:00. He was always there. He was never working.

This was, again, like work from home is really big now, and for your audience, you wouldn’t even think twice about it. But in 2003, 2004, nobody worked from home. Everybody went to an office except for this man.

But it turns out, like, again, we somehow found out that he was suing his employer because he had a back problem and he was on some sort of medical leave.

I don’t really remember exactly how it all went down, but yeah, so that was the other—there was another lawsuit or some sort of complaint, and he was just getting a paycheck for not doing anything.

Again, putting in expensive paint on his garage floor and spending tens of thousands on a garage floor and spending tens of thousands of dollars on solar panels on a very, very expensive house at the time.

So yeah, the man didn’t work. So the whole thing was just weird.

So, the phone calls that we would get—so he claimed to be like a paralegal, but he was also a paramedic or something. I don’t remember. He was both somehow. Again, weird. And a photographer and an award-winning photographer.

It was strange.

And like—but he would call us up and say something along the lines of—again, my buddy’s name is Matt. He would say—he called Matt more often than he called me, thankfully. Poor Matt.

But he would call Matt and say, “Hey, Matthew.” Always, “Hey, Matthew. Hey, Matthew. I don’t want to have to put on my lawyer hat on, but the solar panels aren’t performing up to the specifications that you told me.”

And again, this was like once a week.

And it would usually be like there was a leaf on the panel or something like that, or a couple leaves on the panel. But, you know, a normal person would go up and sweep them off, but he didn’t do that.

We would go out and, again, once a week: “Hey, Matthew,” or “Hey, Gregory, I don’t want to put on my legal hat” or my attorney hat or something, with the implication of, “I’m going to sue you if you don’t come out here right away.”

And then that went on for a long time.

Morgan Friedman: Totally.

Greg Digneo: In the beginning, we probably went like every time.

Morgan Friedman: In the beginning, probably went like every time.

Greg Digneo: Correct. Yeah. And then after like two, three years, we just started to ignore him. And we were just like, dude, just sue us. I don’t care at this point. Go for it. Take us to court.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Digneo: We eventually got to that point.

And then after about 2009, 2010, like, we would hear from him once every couple years, once every two, three years.

And there was a couple times where he would call us up drunk.

Morgan Friedman: No slurring?

Greg Digneo: Yeah. Slurring voice. Just go slurring like, “Hey, Greg, hey, Matthew,” like just—I don’t want to put—

And then he would go into this ramble of like stuff, and there was like just this incoherent thought train, and we were just like, “Dude, he’s drunk. He’s calling us right now.”

So that was another thing that was happening. Again, that was later on, and then it would be once every year or two.

And then finally, sometime like 2015, 2016, we just—we hadn’t heard from him in a while, and the two of us were at a happy hour one time and we’re just Googling. We’re like, “What the hell ever happened to him?”

And it turns out he got arrested because he was pulling people over and impersonating a police officer.

Morgan Friedman: So, yeah.

Greg Digneo: So what happened was, the police officers barged into his house and took him and, you know, walked all over the house and brought him up a little bit and took him out of the house.

And then apparently he was suing the police department for, you know, for injuries or something like that.

But yeah, so that was that.

And then finally, in 2020, the story ends because he calls up Matt. My buddy Matt is still in the solar business. And he calls up Matt and says, “Hey, I want to remove the solar panels.”

And my friend Matt’s like, “Perfect, fine, good.”

But here’s the stipulation that he laid out. He said, “But I want you to damage them when you’re removing them.”

And my buddy Matt is like, “No, I am not doing that.”

Morgan Friedman: Why did he want them to damage them?

Greg Digneo: Well, so we think he wanted to commit some sort of fraud. He tried to commit fraud before with them because during the—we had a hurricane in 2012, like Superstorm Sandy. It was 2011 maybe. I don’t know if you remember Hurricane Sandy, but it was a big deal on the East Coast because we don’t get hurricanes where I live.

And he tried to claim—he got one of his friends, who was an insurance adjuster, insurance appraiser or something, to come out and try to get him to say that the solar panels were damaged by the wind.

And the insurance appraiser was like, “I’m not doing that. That’s illegal. Like, they’re fine. They’re working perfectly. They’re fine. There’s no damage whatsoever.”

And so when he was getting them taken down, he wanted them damaged.

And my buddy Matt said, “I am not doing that. I am going to take a picture of every single one as they’re placed on the ground, and you can do whatever you want after that, but I will have a picture of every single one of these placed on the ground.”

And that was the end of the story. We’ve never heard from him since.

Morgan Friedman: As a technical question, if you guys were the ones that installed it and were responsible, if he was taking down and claiming and wanted to claim damage, wouldn’t he want to claim damage against you guys? So, it kind of makes no sense.

Greg Digneo: I think he was going to claim damage just with an insurance company.

Morgan Friedman: With insurance company?

Greg Digneo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think he wanted to do anything with us. I think he wanted to just get an insurance—get somebody with insurance to come out and just say, “Oh yeah, these were damaged.” That kind of thing.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Greg Digneo: Yeah. I don’t think it was against us. I don’t think it had anything to do with us. I think it was just him wanting to get his money back in some way, which is stupid because the payback—I mean, he had them off for 17, 18 years.

The solar panels already paid for themselves. So, yeah.

Morgan Friedman: So, so many lessons from this. Yeah, share some things you’ve learned from this crazy—

Greg Digneo: Yeah. So, a couple things that I shared.

So, the very first lesson is the character of the client or the customer is crucially important. That’s one thing. As you said, if they’re talking about suing their other vendors or their other service providers or other people, if that’s like their thing that they’re kind of talking about and bragging about, like, just walk away because they’re going to do that to you or they’re going to threaten you. It’s just a matter of time.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, you added a nuance I want to call attention to, where it’s not just did he mention in a conversation he sued another vendor, but he was bragging about it.

Greg Digneo: He was bragging about it. Correct.

It wasn’t like—if there’s legitimate reasons why people were suing other folks, right? Like, my parents, when I was a kid, work didn’t get finished and they had to put a lien on the company because the work just didn’t get finished after like six months.

But they never told anybody about it. Like, they didn’t go to the guy who was—the next contractor who was doing the work. They weren’t like, “Oh yeah, so-and-so, we put a lien on so-and-so’s stuff.” Like, that never happened.

Like, they would just—they never, you know, when the guy was like, “Oh, how come it’s not finished?” They just said, “Oh, you know, the company, they didn’t finish it, and we’re just taking care of that now.” That was it.

Like, there’s reasons to sue people. I get it.

But in the very first thing, to be like, “Yo, I got this floor for free. You know what I mean? We sued the hell out of this company and they gave it to us and we got it for free.” You know what I mean?

There’s a difference there. It’s a different kind of like—

Morgan Friedman: It’s a different thing.

Greg Digneo: Like, we didn’t care about the floor. We weren’t working on the floor. There was no reason to tell us that you were suing somebody else. It just—it told you about his character.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. It just told you exactly what you wanted to know about him.

Greg Digneo: So that’s the one thing that we learned.

Morgan Friedman: So, the quality of the client—by the way, there’s another lesson related to the quality of the client, which is people don’t change. Like, 20 years later, he’s still pulling these same sort of stunts.

Greg Digneo: 100%. He’s still trying to scam people.

Morgan Friedman: Totally. Absolutely. He’s still scamming.

Greg Digneo: So, yeah, so that was the other thing that we—we were stupid and we learned after this is that like, we didn’t—in our contract, we didn’t have a finality of work.

You know what I mean? We just assumed like, yeah, once we’re done, we’re done.

And again, it took us to the third person to where we’re like, here’s where—here’s where we end right here. You know what I mean? Like, once the last bolt is tightened, we’re done.

Like, we are no longer responsible for this. If you want to hire us to service it, that’s cool. That’s fine. We’ll do that for you.

But once this bolt is tightened and you agree and it passes inspection and you’re happy with how it’s running for a week or whatever it is, and it meets that expectation for the first week—what we told you it was going to do—we’re done.

Morgan Friedman: I like this phrase, “finality of work.”

And it’s a subtle provision that very few people, when they’re starting out, put that into a contract. You learned through stories.

Greg Digneo: I didn’t. Yeah, we didn’t know either.

And then after this nightmare, we started doing that. So, I guess those are the two biggest lessons that we took from this.

Let’s see if I can brainstorm some other lessons.

Morgan Friedman: I love the detail that he drunk-dialed you.

Greg Digneo: Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: That is a—

Greg Digneo: Well, that’s in the middle of the story. So, that’s towards the end. That’s like 10 years, 10, 12 years after the solar panels were installed.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Insane.

Greg Digneo: This is like—the drunk dials were like—so his—In fact, I’ll never forget it. Go meet his daughter, who is now 11. So, the baby was just born. Just met her, like literally coming back from the hospital. We’re—my wife and I are going to meet her.

So, she’s 11 years old. 12 years old. I’m so sorry. So, this is 2013.

And he’s like, “Greg, you gotta hear this.” As I’m holding the baby, he’s like, “Greg, you got to hear this.”

And it was this man slurring, with a drunk dial.

So, yeah. So, this is like 2013, 2012, somewhere in that range. I forget how old the girl is, but she’s not a teenager yet, just for time frame.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Yeah.

So, what’s interesting about drunk dialing, even though it’s already towards the end of the story and you knew for a long time he was crazy, he makes an interesting point about crossing professional boundaries as well.

Greg Digneo: For sure.

Morgan Friedman: Because his 10 years of complaining—that is unfair in one way. Like, there was clear implicit finality of work, and future contracts you now make that explicit.

But separate from that, when professional work crosses bounds into social things like drunk dialing, it becomes crazy risky.

Greg Digneo: So, like, as a double standard, if this happened to my wife or if this happened to my sister, I would have been way more pissed off.

Morgan Friedman: Pissed off.

Greg Digneo: Correct. It happened to me. The man was older. He was out of shape. He was like, you know, whatever.

Morgan Friedman: If it were a young, hot client of—young, hot female client of yours, you wouldn’t have complained so much.

Greg Digneo: Well, I mean, my wife would have complained.

Morgan Friedman: Your wife would have. That’s right.

Greg Digneo: But like, no, no, no. Like, but like if it was my wife, my sister, you know, a woman like that, if it was one of our account managers or something like that—we had hired some women account managers.

If it was one of my account managers, I would have been way more upset, way more pissed off, and we probably would have taken some sort of action there in terms of like, “Yo, dude, we’ve got to—we’re going to get a restraining order or something like that.”

But like, again, it was me. It was Matt. So, it wasn’t anything where we felt threatened personally in that regard.

Morgan Friedman: So, yeah, there was a double standard, but you’re right, it did cross a line and it was very creepy.

Greg Digneo: It was another—it was wacky. I’m laughing just thinking about it.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah.

Greg Digneo: Another more subtle lesson is—

Morgan Friedman: I’m intrigued that you would always use the same phrase. “I need to put my lawyer hat on.”

Greg Digneo: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: To me, when someone has a phrase that they always use, that means when they’re using that phrase, they’re in autopilot.

When you’re not in autopilot mode, you think about new, original things to say. But when you repeat the same speech, that means you’ve done it many times before, which is more evidence that he’s been going around to lots of—

Greg Digneo: 100%. 100%.

I don’t remember if we thought about this, but maybe I thought about it later, but maybe he bragged about suing the floor company or the paint company or whatever because he knew he was going to—just like, that’s his MO, right?

Like, “Hey, if I just threaten them, like, ‘Hey, I’m going to put my attorney hat on,’ or ‘I’m going to put my lawyer hat on,’ or whatever it is.”

Morgan Friedman: For the exact phrase, I wish I—

Greg Digneo: It was a lawyer hat.

Morgan Friedman: Lawyer or legal?

Greg Digneo: Never attorney. I’m sorry. I’m going to put my lawyer hat on or my legal hat on.

Morgan Friedman: And he wasn’t even a lawyer.

Greg Digneo: That was the worst. That was the funniest part about it.

But yeah, so like, it was always like, “Hey, if I tell them that I sued them, somebody else, and then I could always use this phrase, not going to put my legal hat on,” and that implying that we’re going to sue—no, we’re going to sue them.

Morgan Friedman: So, I’ve known or had to interact in various ways with multiple bad people who had a particular MO, which was they would always tell the person that they’re going to do a bad thing, like, long before they actually did, because in their mind it gives them this plausible deniability.

“No, the other person knew I was going to do it. They effectively agreed to do it.”

I’ve noticed—I’ve seen this pattern particularly in terms of watching friends date, where I’ve had female friends who, like, a guy on the first date would say things like, “Hey, I’m just going to make you fall in love with me, and then the moment you fall in love with me, I’m going to disappear.”

And then the guy does.

Greg Digneo: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: I feel like this is very much the similar psychological pattern, because you feel less evil if you say, “Hey, I told you I was going to take advantage of you and date you. You could have left me at any time. You didn’t, which means you wanted to play the game. We got your buy-in. So therefore, it’s fair for me to do that.”

Greg Digneo: Yeah. I don’t know if that was going on in his mind. I truly can’t—I like, this man obviously is a sociopath, right? Like, there’s something wrong with him, and so I don’t even pretend to think that I know what was going on in his mind.

I always wondered if he was like trying to put that into our brains. I would imagine that he was, for sure, but I can’t—I don’t know.

Morgan Friedman: There’s a famous phrase from an esoteric scientist, Aleister Crowley. He wrote a bunch about it, and he has a line along these lines—is like, the way for the call notes, I should look at the exact wording, but it’s something like the way evil works is that it has to show off what it’s doing and get buy-in before it does something like this.

So this is like the less deep version of that.

Greg Digneo: For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah.

Greg Digneo: And he was less evil and more crazy, I think.

Morgan Friedman: I don’t know. I don’t know if he was evil. Like, he was crazy, though. He was nuts.

I would point out I think it’s a—I think if you are evil, it’s a very smart strategy to pretend to be crazy.

Greg Digneo: True.

Morgan Friedman: Because if you think—you know, it’s like with politicians. If you think all politicians rob and steal, so like all politicians are terrible and unethical.

But if you think this politician over there is a genius, then you’ll be like, “Oh my God, he’s an evil genius trying to steal money and oppress us.”

But if there’s that politician over there, if you think he’s just like, “Yeah, he’s a freaking idiot. He doesn’t know left from right. He can barely read.”

If you think he’s so stupid, then guess what? You’re not going to think he’s like the evil mastermind oppressing the world. You’re going to think he’s just some Joe Schmo, and thus you won’t turn your investigative energies over to him.

Greg Digneo: Correct. Yep. That’s why it’s interesting.

Morgan Friedman: My last lesson—this is a quick one and then we can wrap up.

Greg Digneo: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Is I love the final footnote that like 15 years later, it’s like, “Hey, can you do this?” And then he asked Matt, and then Matt said, “I’m going to take pictures of this just to be sure.”

And I think that there’s a powerful lesson there, which is once you know someone is crazy, evil, challenging, then it makes sense to go all out with your documentation.

Greg Digneo: Totally.

Morgan Friedman: In order to—

Greg Digneo: Yeah, 100%. You kind of learned that lesson of like, yeah, Matt’s thought, if I have to get wrapped up into this in any way, shape, or form, like, I want to make 100% certain that my tracks are covered.

Like, none of this comes back on me. That there’s nothing that I did. You know what I mean? Like, there’s no way for anybody to be like, “Hey, they were ripped or broken on the way down,” or things like that.

The man had a big backyard, so Matt placed them on pallets in the backyard because that’s where he said he wanted them.

So he placed them on pallets in the backyard, then covered them with a tarp to make sure that, you know, there was minimal weather damage or things like that.

We can talk about it from time to time, but neither of us have any idea what ever happened to the panels, to him, to any of it.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Wow.

Greg, this has been a great story. This game—and I think you might have the record for the longest-lasting client horror story.

Greg Digneo: Well, I don’t want to say thank you because it’s a terrible record, and I hope nobody breaks it. So, yeah, please, if you learn anything from this: no crazy clients, you know, trust your judgment, and then finality of work.

This is why you work the ends, because you don’t want to be dealing with a client 10, 15, 20 years later, because it’s terrible.

Morgan Friedman: Oh my God. Yeah. Crazy people are out there.

Greg Digneo: Yes. 100%.

Morgan Friedman: With these wise words, thank you, Greg. It’s been awesome, fun, and hysterical.

And everyone who’s made it to the end, we hope that you’ve enjoyed listening to and watching this as much as we had.

Until next time.