customer integrity or lack thereof...

Mr. Fix-it recently repaired an old Ariens snowblower for a customer that almost isn't a customer. What I mean by that is he is not a regular customer and we have only repaired this machine for him once,and it was more than 10 years ago.
We took the 1968 Ariens snowblower in about two months ago...over time Mr. Fix-it went through it. He repaired bushings in the axle, the second stage fan bearing, the idler pulleys, the carburetor, belts, I i could go on and on...but you get my point, it was a lot of work.
About a week after the delivery, and still having not been paid for the repair because the customer did not have any money, we received a cryptic telephone message from customer saying that he thinks he has  a pair of our pliers at his house.????? Mr. Fix-It calls him when he receives the message and talks to the customer who states we must have dropped them in his driveway and that they are now thoroughly jammed between the auger and housing.
We pack a bucket of tools,Mr. Fix-it and I are going to check this out right away....we take a hammer, some drifts and some shear pins , just in case.
We get there, I ring the doorbell, the customer comes to the door, I ask him to open the garage, he is semi-handicapped (due to his habit of eating too much food) so it takes him a while to get to the door opener. The door opens and we go in to check it out. There is a pair of 8 inch pliers jammed in there pretty good, and one of the shear pins has been snapped ( thus doing the job it has been designed to do). Mr. fix- It gets the hammer and drift and gives it a few good raps.....the pliers come loose. He changes the sheared pin....the whole time this is happening, maybe a minute or two, the customer keeps stating the pliers must be ours. I know all our tools,and they clearly aren't ours.
The customer lived on a dead end road, with a pond right there,.The  ice fisherman regularly park there and I walked over there and there is always an array of miscellaneous items in the road, just like there was that day. I suggested this might be the case to the customer. He wasn't buying that....the customer actually doesn't even use the snowblower, his neighbor walks down and in exchange for blowing his own driveway does our customers  along with another neighbors. (Its also possible he picked up the pliers running it up and down the street doing those other driveways?)

this is my thought on the matter...

the customers goal was to get this fixed, and not take any money out of his pocket no matter what. for a service call. It's too bad his lack of integrity has lost him the services of Mr. Fix-It...I hope that juicy steak he was putting on the grill that night was worth it.

 integrity:  mean uprightness of character or action. honesty implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. honor suggests an active or anxious regard for the standards of one's profession, calling, or position. integrity implies trustworthiness and incorruptibility to a degree that one is incapable of being false to a trust, responsibility, or pledge