Excavators

Our excavator is getting a letter in the mail tomorrow. Our phone conversations have been less than productive and I keep missing him on the site. It's not that I think he's dishonest or trying to screw me. He just doesn't listen to what I tell him. It's as though he's there putting a road in for himself and takes direction from no one. I understand that what I'm asking him to do is out of the ordinary. His typical customer would not rent a backhoe to run their own underground power. Or spend a few days with a wheel barrow and shovel spreading topsoil when an excavator could do the same work in a couple hours. What he doesn't want to hear is that I need to do some the work myself to save money. I'm not asking him to do the same work for less. I'm asking him to do less.
His quoted prices for jobs are rounded up to the nearest thousand as though he doesn't want to bother himself with details involving numbers with fifties in them. Perhaps I would have been less likely to question the price for the septic system if it had been $9950 instead of a clean $10,000. But having had a septic system installed in the past, I knew that within that 10 grand was perhaps $500 for seeding and mulching-- something I can most certainly do myself. I knew that he would have a significant sum assigned to bringing in roughly 25 cubic yards of topsoil and spreading it over the top of the septic system-- topsoil that we already have on site following the construction of the road. Or perhaps standard procedure here would be to take away my topsoil and then sell it back to me. But details like this would not involve round numbers in the thousands. Maybe, like Bush, he doesn't do nuance.