The Human Diagnostic

There was a blower motor in a house north of Okarche that had been telling on itself for the better part of two years, and the woman who lived there could not hear it. I could hear it from the driveway. I want to talk about that today, because it is one of the strangest and most useful things I have learned in forty-five years of walking into other people's houses. The person who lives with a...

I want to talk about the lie everybody tells themselves, including me, and tells it again the very next day. It was June, a Tuesday, north side of Kingfisher. A man called about his upstairs not cooling. He met me in the driveway already half apologizing, because he'd told his wife I'd be in and out in twenty minutes and she'd planned the afternoon around it. He said: it's prob...

I want to talk about the time a customer trusted me more because I screwed up in front of her. It was a March morning out past Okarche. Gravel drive, a propane tank along the fence line, the grass still that flat brown it gets before it remembers how to be green. Furnace call. Older couple, retired, the kind of house where everything has a place and the place is labeled. The man met me at the door...

There's a kind of call I've come to recognize before I even get the unit open. It's an old house with one person in it, and that person has been waiting for somebody to talk to. You learn the signs at the door. The screen door has a particular hinge sound. There's a recliner facing the front window so they can see the driveway. And when you say you're there to look at the...

I want to talk about how a person decides whether I did a good job, because it almost never matches what actually happened in the house. There was a furnace call back in January, deep cold, the kind of morning where the ground crunches and your breath hangs and the truck door handle bites your bare hand. North edge of Kingfisher, a frame house with a propane tank in the side yard and a dog on a ch...

She called me back four times in one evening, and the system was already working when she made the second call. It was a furnace that wouldn't cycle right. October, the first real cold snap, the kind that comes in overnight and makes everybody remember they have a furnace at all. She lived alone in a brick ranch out past the school, and the unit was throwing a fault every few hours. Heat, the...

I was at a customer's house in late spring. She was a woman in her early sixties, retired teacher, lived alone in a house she had raised her kids in. I had been to this house probably six times over the years on small things. New capacitor. Coil clean. One bad contactor. Nothing big. The system was original to the house, a sixteen-year-old Goodman split system, running fine, end of its expect...

I got a call on a Tuesday in early August. Customer in a newer build out in Piedmont, second house from the corner on a cul-de-sac. He had not had any issue with his HVAC. Nothing was broken. The system was a builder-grade Goodman, ten years old, working fine. He said on the phone, I need somebody to come out and quote me a new system, today if you can. I told him I had room about three in the aft...

There is a customer of mine who runs a small construction company in central Oklahoma. He is in his early fifties. Started his business at twenty-six with one truck and a partner who quit on him in 2002. Built the company through the housing crash and the years after. He is good at what he does. His crews are reliable. His pricing is honest. His finishes are tight. His reputation has been earning...

I had a customer about two years ago who could not let me find anything wrong with his house. Not because the house was perfect. The house was middle-aged, normal, had its share of issues. He had called me out for what he thought was a refrigerant leak. I checked the system, found a small leak in the line set where it had been hit by a weed trimmer some years earlier, and started telling him what...

I have a customer who has been telling me for four years that he is going to insulate his attic. The materials are on his garage floor. Two pallets of R-49 batt, a roll of vapor barrier, a box of staples, safety glasses still in the plastic. Bought in March of 2022. Every maintenance visit he points at the pallets and says, that is the project for this fall. It is never that fall. He is a smart, o...

I have a category of customer in their forties who I find easier to work with than almost any other group. Mostly born between 1977 and 1983. A six-year window. Not Gen X, exactly. Not millennial, exactly. There is a name that got popular about ten years ago. Xennials. When his furnace quits, the Xennial calls me. On the phone. Like a regular person. He does not first diagnose it from a YouTube vi...

There is an old man in Hennessey who lives with a yellow lab named Gus. His wife passed in 2020. Same house since 1979. When I went out there for a no-heat call, the dog sat at his feet the whole time, and the man talked to me and talked to Gus in the exact same tone. When I finished the ticket, he said, Gus has gotten me through. That sentence landed. Most people who do not own dogs do not know w...

I have a customer in her late thirties who told me, while I was changing her filter, that she has been tired since 2018. Not sick. Not depressed. Just tired. Sleep does not fix it. Vacation does not fix it. The tiredness has become the medium she lives in. She said it the way you would say something about the weather. Just a fact about her life. There is a name for it. Christina Maslach built the...

I have known a lot of techs over forty-five years who were excellent at the work and could not pay their light bill. Gifted hands, customers who ask for them by name, and a truck one bad alternator away from being a project car. I stopped calling it bad luck a long time ago. There is a name for the inside of it. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes called it the impostor phenomenon back in 1978. The HV...

I have a whole category of customers in their fifties who do not want me to text them updates. They want the work done. Tell them when I am on the way, do good work, send the bill, stop. No check-ins, no truck-is-twelve-minutes-out alert, no survey two days later. I used to think that was just personality. The older I get, the more I notice the customers who feel this most strongly are mostly Gen...

I have a customer who has read every HVAC blog on the internet. Early fifties, software job, smart and polite. He has a Trane variable-speed system, a thermostat app, a humidifier, a media filter, a UV light. Every maintenance visit he has a list of things he has been meaning to do. A register to rebalance in the back bedroom, a humidifier pad that has sat on his desk for three months, a duct seal...

I went out to a retired schoolteacher in late 2023 to talk about replacing a 1998 heat pump. Twenty-six years old, loud, limping, on borrowed time. House paid off, husband passed in 2014, a pension and savings that left her well taken care of. I put three options on her kitchen table. She looked at the bottom number on the variable-speed Trane, about twelve thousand installed, and said, Dave, I ca...

I have a customer who told me, plain, that she does not leave her house except for the grocery store and the doctor. She is sixty-eight, a widow, in a little ranch she and her husband built in 1981. Her daughter in Edmond reads it as her mother withdrawing from the world. After four years working on that house, I have come to read it differently. There is a body of research in environmental psycho...

I have a customer in her early forties who runs a small bookkeeping business out of her dining room. Single mother, two boys, a house she keeps better than most. A few years back she caught a leaking evaporator coil on her own system before I did. No HVAC training, no meter. She just noticed the basement smelled different and the upstairs was running a degree warmer at the same thermostat setting,...

A service tech sees the back of the house. The customer presents the front. The polished entryway. The candle that gets lit before company arrives. The good towels in the guest bathroom. Then the tech walks past all of it, into the utility closet next to the garage, behind the laundry, into the attic, around the side of the house, and sees what the front door was protecting. Erving Goffman wrote t...

I went out to a house in May to install a new furnace and air handler. The customer was a man about my age, sixty-two, divorced, no kids in Oklahoma. He had taken early retirement from a refinery job two years before. He had decided to move to a smaller place in Stillwater closer to his daughter. While I worked, he packed boxes in the living room. Books mostly. I asked him when moving day was. He...

There is a kind of customer who, when you walk in, does not want a relationship. She is not rude. She is not cold. She has answered the door, shown you the thermostat, pointed at the indoor unit, and now she would like you to do your work and let her go back to whatever she was doing before you got there. Most of the techs I have trained read this customer wrong. They think she is unfriendly. They...

There is a particular kind of customer I am seeing more of now than I did twenty years ago. She is in her early sixties. Her kids are grown and gone. And she has just sold the four thousand square foot house on the north end of town and bought a fourteen hundred square foot bungalow built in 1958 with a one ton condenser on a pad next to the bedroom window. She called me to look at the bungalow&ap...

There is a sentence I hear at least twice a month. It comes out of customers who finally call me after their system has been broken for weeks. Sometimes months. They open the door and say, I just gave up. They say it like an apology, like they let me down by not calling sooner. I have learned that sentence is data. A man called me in late August last year. House south of Hennessey. Single story, b...