Steve Hyland

Avoid workng for HFS. Part of the problem for working for Hyland Filter service is that you get paid per job or per store. When you factor in your drive time to each store, the time it takes to complete each job and get to the next location you end up making peanuts. I think the pay per store was something like $22.50 or 25% of the billable cost. While the company does arrange your route for you it still takes time to get to each store. I found at least fifteen minutes and if you do not live in the immediate area forget it. In my state the majority of the stores on my route were in the south and I live in the north so the majority of each week I found myself driving two hours just to get to the start of my route and I didn't even start work yet. Also the job is dangerous most stores have a ladder in their back storeroom which leads to a roof hatch but some don't so you end up having to drive around back and pull a twenty foot ladder off of the truck to climb up onto the roof. It wasn't too bad in the summertime though still a little hairy at times but I couldn't imagine doing that in the winter in the snow and ice. You would break your neck. Another thing is that you need your own tools something which I was never told at the interview. The guy who had trained me ended up taking all of his tools out of the van he gave me after I had dropped him off at a hotel where he was staying while he was up from Kentucky. To open the door to the HVAC roof units you need a socket wrench which I didn't have. Since I had to be on the road by six am the next day I had no time to run over to Home Depot to pick once up so I ended up using needle nose pliers which took me a year and a day to get anything completed. That day my last job consisted of rushing on the roof of a mall while the sun was going down and working about forty five minutes by the light of the moon. I finally finished at 9 pm at night and still had a two hour ride home from the middle of nowhere in a van with 250,000 miles on it and every conceivable dashboard light flashing on and to top it off I was never paid for the three ten hour days I spent training and my last day where I was out from 6 am until 11 at night.