Is this normal procedure?

[JIMRPT@AOL.COM]

Phil;
 With all due respect to Les, and believe me there is a bunch there, I have a
little different viewpoint of the school contract dilly.  And everything Les
said is true!!, but..............
  At your stage of experience a contract such as this 'might' be good for
you...
IF--you can get a reasonable price for the work of tuning.
IF--you can get an agreed price per hour or portion thereof for repair without
prior approval.
IF--you can make the time to make these thingees sound better.
IF--you can negotiate a longer time frame for the work to be done, you'll have
to ask firmly. As Avery and Les and Susan said, the person issuing the request
for bid may not even know what a piano looks like :-)
  The main reason I think it 'might' be good for you is that it will enable
you to see problems in just one year that will take you many years to come
across in private tuning.
 What will this do besides drive you crazy??? :-)
1. It will help you hone the skills in diagnostics, to do the things that
really need to be done in the time you have to work.
2. It will help you do repeated repairs so that you will feel very comfortable
when next you run across them.
3. It will help you to be able to work with a very severe time limitation and
find ways to work smarter and with less lost motion.
4. It will give you the opportunity to make and correct dumb mistakes without
the owner standing there tapping their foot and glowering at you.
5. It will be an aggravating, painful, frustrating experience so much so that
you will auto delete my posts, if you don't already, after you have worked
your way out of the contract and can lead a normal life.
6. It will give you experience that 50 trips to Atalnta won't.
7. It will allow you, next year or the year after, to tell someone else asking
the same question on the list that you've 'been there' 'done that' and that
you don't recommend it :-)

  The thing that Blew my gasket the most with school work was to go to a
school for  contract tuning and find another tuner there tuning a "special"
piano for a "special" program at the FULL GOING RATES!!!! *7%$##*(@""}<>. It
will happen though.
A different point of view huh?
Jim Bryant (FL)