The Human Diagnostic

I was on my way to Yukon when the call came in. System wasn't cooling. Customer needed someone out that day. I said I could be there by two. And then she asked: before you come, just tell me the worst case number. I've had a lot of questions on the phone before a service call. That one is different. Most people understand that a price before a diagnosis is a guess. But this wasn't r...

I was called out to a house in Kingfisher on a hot Thursday in July. The woman who answered the door walked me straight to the utility closet before I had my clipboard out. And then she stayed there, in the doorway, for the entire call. She had a notepad. She wrote down every gauge reading. She asked a question every few minutes. She never drifted to the kitchen, never checked her phone, never gav...

I gave an estimate in Yukon in October for a new furnace and air handler. She was getting two bids. She called two weeks later to say she'd gone with the other company. That happens. I thanked her and told her to call if she needed anything. I thought that was the end of it. She called again eleven days later. The other company had rescheduled her twice. The install hadn't happened yet....

A woman called from Enid in late September. They were closing on the sale of their house in three weeks and she wanted someone to check the system before it changed hands. That's a normal request. But then she said: I'd also just like to know it's okay. One more time. That last part stayed with me on the drive out. The house was brick, single story, big elm in front that had been th...

I went out to a house in Guthrie on a Thursday in May for a routine tune-up. The system was in good shape: nothing to report, clean coil, good capacitors, refrigerant right where it should be. When I came back to give the summary, there was an iced tea sitting on the porch rail for me. She asked if I had a minute. I did. What followed was forty minutes of Carol telling me about the last three year...

I went out to Hennessey in late June to look at a sixteen-year-old system that had been kept alive by a series of repairs over five years. Gary met me in the driveway and told me exactly what he needed: get it through one more summer. He had a folder in the kitchen with every service record and the total he'd spent. He knew the math didn't work. He still couldn't make himself pull t...

There is a kind of customer who tells me what is wrong with the air conditioner before I have set my bag down. And then she tells me again, the same sentence, the same words, while I am opening the panel. And then a third time, while I am pulling the filter. I used to think she was anxious. I used to think she did not trust me to listen. I do not think that anymore. I went out to a house in Hennes...

I have spent forty-five years in other people's houses fixing things that were not my problem. Not the air conditioner. The air conditioner is my problem. That is what they called me for. I mean the conversation that was already going when I walked in, the breaker box that someone double-tapped years ago and pretended was code, the marriage that was thinning out across the kitchen table while...

I pulled up to the house on a Tuesday afternoon in August. Modest ranch, neat yard, older pickup in the drive with a toolbox in the bed that had seen some years. Before I was out of my truck the homeowner was already walking out to meet me, and I knew what I was looking at before he said a word. Forty years in the trade leaves a mark on a man. You can see it in the hands. He stuck his hand out and...

I sat at a kitchen table in Kingfisher last August across from a woman with four binders. Four. Not one. Four. Each binder had tabs. Each tab had printouts. One was system reviews. One was quotes, five of them from four different companies. One was financing options, APR and term and monthly and total-of-payments. One was handwritten notes with arrows connecting things. Her system had been out for...

The call was a heat pump not cooling right. Duplex on the north side of town, the half she owned, the other half rented out for twenty years. I'd serviced the system twice before. She was eighty-three. She answered the door in a cardigan the color of dry grass. She said: come in, I made coffee, you don't have to drink it. I said: I'll drink it. There were boxes along one wall. Not m...

Got called out on a furnace diagnostic in late March. House about fifteen minutes west of Kingfisher, out where the section lines still mean something. Before I'd even stepped out of the truck I was taking inventory. Half-built chicken coop in the side yard, good framing, nothing on the roof yet. Next to it, a greenhouse with three walls of polycarbonate and no fourth wall. Next to that, stac...

I went out on a service call a while back that I didn't end up selling anything on. I want to talk about why. The house was a newer build on the south side of Kingfisher. The man who answered the door pulled it open and handed me a manila folder. I said: what's this. He said: these are the quotes. I've been collecting them for three years. I sat down at his kitchen table and opened...

Ran a service call in late March. Retired guy, maybe seventy, lives south of Kingfisher off 81. Furnace acting up, cycling short. He met me in the driveway, deliberate man, the kind who points with his whole hand. Before I'd even set my meter down he said: come inside first, I want to show you something. He walked me to the dining room table. Three-ring binder sitting square in the middle, in...

There's a woman on the north side of Kingfisher I've been out to see six times in the last two years. Sharp as a tack. And she can't remember my name. Every visit opens the same way. I come up the walk, she opens the door before I knock, and her face does this little thing where she knows she ought to know what to call me. The first time it happened she apologized for about three mi...

Got a call last fall out on a section line road west of Kingfisher. Replacement quote on a twenty-year-old split system. Nothing unusual about the equipment. Something unusual about the conversation. The woman who met me at the door was maybe fifty-five. In the first ninety seconds she said three things. If we'd bought the other house, we'd have had geothermal in from the start. My dad w...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , minimization as coping style; Lazarus and Folkman stress and coping theory (1984) There's a certain kind of customer who, by the time they call, has waited so long that what I find and what they've told themselves they were dealing with are very far apart. This was one of those. He called because the system wasn't keeping up...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , alexithymia (Sifneos, 1973); emotional literacy and interoceptive awareness; stoicism as emotional regulation style This one I almost misjudged. I want to be clear about that upfront. I almost read him wrong and would have walked away from the call with the wrong understanding of what had happened. He's been a customer for three years...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , shame versus guilt (June Price Tangney, George Mason; Brené Brown, Houston); self-concealment theory (Larson & Chastain, 1990) He knew. He knew before he called and he definitely knew by the time I pulled up. What I had to work through was getting him to a place where he could let me find it without it becoming a thing. The call was a...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , dependent decision-making, external locus of control (Rotter, 1954); approval-seeking behavior This one required me to adjust my timeline, which I'm used to doing. What I'm less used to is adjusting it twice, for the same decision, for the same reason. She called about a system that wasn't keeping up. Early June, system eigh...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , perfectionism research (Hewitt & Flett, 1991); perfectionism as fear of judgment, not love of quality I'm going to tell you about a customer who probably got under my skin a little and then tell you why I think that's on me and not on her. She called for a system installation. New Trane, two-stage, replacing an aging unit she...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , verbal flooding as anxiety regulation; social anxiety expressed through speech (Clark & Wells, 1995) Long drive home and I'm laughing a little bit about this one, which I think is the right response to it. The call was a diagnostic on a system that wasn't cooling well. Medium complexity , turned out to be a dirty evaporator c...

Format: Pre-call and post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , classical conditioning, hypervigilance, confirmation bias; Robert Cialdini's research on trust and social proof On the way out I'm going through what I know. New customer. Found me through a neighbor. Mentioned on the call that he'd had a bad experience with his last HVAC company. Said it without a lot of detail...

Format: Pre-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Psychology , competence identity, ego threat, Carol Dweck's fixed vs. growth mindset research (Stanford, 2006) Heading out to a call I've already mapped out in my head three different ways, because the customer told me over the phone that he'd already tried some things. When a customer tells you that, you learn to ask the follow-up questi...

Format: Post-call Runtime: ~8 minutes Source: Bereavement psychology , Bowlby attachment theory; grief and executive function impairment (Parkes, 1972; Stroebe & Schut, 1999) There are calls that stay with you not because anything went wrong but because you understand, partway through, that the call was about something larger than the system. This was one of those. Her name was on the account...