‘Some customers make your job easier. Carol wasn’t one of them’: Pool cleaner’s difficult client Carol demands he vacuum her leaf-covered patio with a pool vacuum, then makes him assemble a pressure washer for free

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Etai Eshet • Editor
Jul 16, 2026 3:15 PM EDT

Some customers think a service fee comes bundled with a genie, three wishes, and a total suspension of the laws of physics. Carol apparently believes a pool vacuum, a machine engineered specifically to function underwater, should also moonlight as a leaf blower, a landscaping crew, and possibly a small miracle, all because she said "just try" with enough confidence to make gravity reconsider its life choices.

 

Asking someone to vacuum a dry patio with equipment built for water is like asking a submarine to also handle your grocery runs because technically it has wheels on the trailer that hauls it. The tool doesn't care how badly you want it to multitask. It has one job, it does that job underwater, and no amount of huffing and marching back into the house changes the laws of suction.

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  • Lady demanded I vacuum her patio… with a pool vacuum.

    Man standing in an empty tiled pool using a pressure washer on a blue mosaic wall.
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    Illustrative image only. Person shown is not connected to this story.

  • I manage a pool company, and part of my job is cleaning a handful of pools each week.
    via Dos734
  • They're mostly customers who have a reputation for being difficult or extremely particular, so I usually handle them instead of sending one of our less experienced technicians.
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  • One of those customers is someone I'll call " Carol." On this particular day, I was vacuuming her pool, which is fairly small, so I'm usually in and out pretty quickly.
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  • The landscapers must have just left, and apparently in a hurry, because the pool deck was absolutely covered with leaves, branches, and grass clippings.
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  • Pool worker uses a long skimmer net to clean a bright blue swimming pool from a wooden deck.
    via Toa55

    Representative image. People shown are not associated with the events described.

  • I was just about finished when I heard the sliding glass door unlatch. I looked up and saw Carol marching straight toward me with a look on her face that said, Where do you think you're going?". "I
    via Dos734
  • Without so much as a "hello", despite the fact that I'd been servicing her pool for about two years and had spoken with her plenty of times, she immediately barked, "When you're done, I want you to vacuum the entire patio around the pool.
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  • It's a mess!" For a second, I honestly thought she was joking. To put it in perspective, there was so much debris that it would've filled multiple trash cans.
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  • Once I realized she was serious, I told her as politely as I could, "That's not possible.
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  • Older woman wearing glasses leans on a red porch railing outside a house with a wooden door.
    via 3tnik

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • The pool vacuum only works underwater." She either didn't believe me or didn't care because, without missing a beat, she huffed, "Well, all I ask is that you try," then turned around and stormed back inside.
    via Dos734
  • I did not, in fact, attempt to vacuum the patio with a pool vacuum. That wasn't even my only memorable interaction with Carol.
    via Dos734

  • Then there's the pressure washer incident, which is really just Carol's whole personality condensed into one scene: a paying customer treating every person on the property, regardless of what they were hired to do, as a general labor pool she personally owns for the afternoon. The pool guy's there to clean the pool. The cleaning lady's there to clean the house. Neither of them signed up to be Carol's personal assembly line, yet somehow both got roped into extra unpaid tasks because Carol operates on the assumption that anyone within shouting distance of her yard owes her free labor.

  • Another time, I arrived to find her cleaning lady struggling to assemble a brand- new pressure washer.
    via Dos734
  • I felt bad for her, but I had a pool to service, so I got to work.
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  • About halfway through, I heard Carol yelling at the cleaning lady from across the yard. Then she shouted over to me, "When you're done, come finish putting it together." Ninety-nine percent of the time, I wouldn't tolerate being spoken to like that.
    via Dos734
  • But I felt sorry for the cleaning lady, so I spent a couple of minutes putting the pressure washer together before heading out.
    via Dos734
  • Some customers make your job easier. Carol wasn't one of them.
    via Dos734

  • What ties both moments together isn't really about pools or patios at all. It's about a certain breed of customer who mistakes politeness for a lack of boundaries, and treats "no" as a suggestion rather than an answer. Carol didn't need her patio vacuumed, she needed someone to say no to her, calmly, and let the impossible physics of the situation do the rest of the talking.

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customer service cleaning customers vacuum cleaner pool entitled customers swimming pool karens in the wild vacuum entitled people
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