The Human Diagnostic

A woman called me a year after a long, hard furnace repair to thank me, and she described it as the best service she ever had. That visit was a slog. Her furnace died on the coldest week of winter, I had to drive back to the shop for a part, and the whole thing ran hours longer than either of us wanted. By any honest accounting it was a frustrating afternoon. But that is not what she kept. What sh...

Furnace tune-up west of town last fall. A man in his late sixties, living alone in a three-bedroom he built in the nineties when his kids were teenagers. I walked in and the walls were bare. Not the never-got-around-to-it kind of bare. The kind where things used to hang and got taken down. You could see the ghosts: the cleaner rectangle, the nail holes, the pencil mark from the level. Three bedroo...

Same brochures on the counter that were there three years ago. I'd been to this house twice before, both times for the same aging heat pump, eighteen years old and in the last chapter of its life. She knew what she was talking about. She knew SEER2. She asked about two-stage versus variable speed. She had a folder with printed specs, comparison charts, highlighted sections, two quotes she&apo...

Winterization call at a lake house northeast of Guthrie, late October. The owners were closing it up for the season. Twenty-two years of the same closing. They worked while I worked. He stacked the porch cushions in the storage room. She rinsed the breakfast dishes with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with dishes. Every motion had the weight of a last one for a while. Neither of them talke...

I drove out to a lake house northeast of Guthrie on a Friday morning in late October. A winterization call. The owners were closing the place up for the season, and the man met me at the door and said they were getting ready to close her up after twenty-two years. It was a practical call on paper. Blow out the lines, check the heating elements, switch the system over, note anything for spring. An...

I pulled up to a house on a section line road south of Enid on a Wednesday in July. The man was already in the driveway, arms crossed, watching me park. He met me at the truck window before I had the door open and told me whoever put this system in did it wrong, and he wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I had never been to that address. I had not installed the system. I said yes sir,...

Format: Pre-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , scarcity mindset (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013); financial trauma; the persistence of scarcity thinking beyond material scarcity Heading out to a call and thinking about something I figured out a few years back about a particular kind of price conversation. There are customers who are price-sensitive because they're in a tight spot...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , interaction rituals and conversational closing (Goffman, 1967); leave-taking anxiety; the difficulty of endings This is a short episode about a long ending. The repair itself was forty minutes. Contactor and capacitor, well-diagnosed, clean work. System came up running fine. I wrote the invoice, explained everything, answered her questions...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , filial piety and role reversal (Boszormenyi-Nagy; relational ethics); triangulated communication in family systems Sometimes you walk into a call and realize there are two conversations happening at once and you're somehow in the middle of both of them. She was in her late eighties. Her daughter had made the appointment. The daughter...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , cognitive aging; fluid vs. crystallized intelligence (Cattell, 1963); processing speed and wisdom There's a version of this call I've done wrong. Not badly , I've never been rude to an elderly customer, never made one feel rushed in a way they'd notice. But there's a version of patience that's external behavio...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , reciprocity and gift psychology (Cialdini, 1984; Mauss, The Gift, 1925); the meaning of overpayment in service relationships I want to tell you about a call where the customer paid me significantly more than I asked for, and what I've figured out since about what that meant. It was a repair. Moderate complexity , blower motor replacem...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , transference and countertransference (Freud; modern relational psychotherapy); the corrective emotional experience (Alexander & French, 1946) I want to tell you about something that happens sometimes that I don't talk about often, because it requires admitting something about the limits of my own objectivity. She called about a he...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , compassion fatigue (Figley, 1995); vicarious exhaustion; the internal cost of sustained empathy This is episode fifty. I want to do something different with it. I want to tell you about the time I almost lost a customer , not because of a bad diagnosis or a pricing dispute , but because I was tired and I let it show. Five days in. Six call...

Format: Pre-call and post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , complicated grief, decision identity confusion; continuing bonds theory (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996) On the way out I'm thinking about what it means to make decisions in a house that isn't yours yet and also will never stop being someone else's. He called about a system that wasn't heating right....

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , illness cognition and self-efficacy (Leventhal's self-regulation model, 1980s); reduced executive capacity; adjustment without drawing attention There are calls where you figure out pretty early that the job in front of you is not the whole job. The HVAC is one thing. What it takes to complete the call well is another. She called abou...

Format: Post-call (and several months after) Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , loneliness and social hunger (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008); parasocial relationship extension; the boundaries of service relationships This one unfolds slowly. I want to tell you about a customer and what happened over about six months, because that's how long it takes for this kind to show itself fully. Fi...

Format: Pre-call and post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , earned trust, competence signaling, and dominance hierarchies (Tooby & Cosmides; Cialdini's authority principle) On the way out. It's been a while since I've had a call where I felt genuinely tested , not in a hostile way, but in the way you feel when someone is actually paying attention and you can tell the...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Environmental psychology , place identity (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff, 1983); biographical place attachment Some houses you walk into and you understand immediately that you're dealing with something that has continuity to it. Not just years , decades. And then you understand that the person who lives there has been there for most of it. He...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Environmental psychology , place attachment theory (Altman & Low, 1992); ambivalence and transitional decision-making This is a short call in terms of time and a long one in terms of what it made me think about afterward. The house was listed. I knew before I got there , he'd mentioned it on the phone. System not cooling, real estate agent sai...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , Richard Thaler's mental accounting and transaction utility (1985); negotiation as identity expression I want to talk about a type I've run into more times than I can count and that I used to handle wrong, and the thing I figured out eventually that changed how I handle it. He called for a diagnosis and possible repair. Compressor...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson, 1993); window of tolerance (Siegel, 1999) I want to tell you about a call that had nothing to do with HVAC and everything to do with what you do when the work stops being the point. I was there for a capacitor replacement. In and out, hour at most. She was in her early sixties. House wa...

She said "we're doing just fine" before I finished stepping through the door. I hadn't said hello yet. House on the west side of Guthrie, furnace not firing reliably. She answered every question I asked the same way. Oh, it's been great. We're doing so well. I'm sure it's nothing serious. Meanwhile there was a hospital tray table in the living room with a wa...

She told me to sit down on the porch bench before I'd even said hello. I thought she was going to warn me about the bill. Instead she told me about the house. The system was twenty-two years old and had been put in the spring her husband passed. She walked me through the whole history before we ever went inside. The bad winter. The last summer all five kids were home. What he was like. She as...

I pulled up to a house in Guthrie on a Friday morning in September. No-heat call, early in heating season. She opened the door and said: come on in. No hello, no handshake. Not rude. Just flat. She stood back further than most people do while I worked. Arms at her sides, not closely watching, more like monitoring. About five minutes in I found the issue: a carbon-fouled flame sensor. Classic. I pu...

I got a call to a farmhouse east of Hennessey on a Wednesday afternoon in late April. The woman who called said she'd had another company out a few weeks earlier and wasn't sure they'd gotten it right. She wanted a second opinion. That's a normal enough reason to call. The prior company had told her the heat exchanger needed replacement, which is never a small number. When I lo...