On Jul 7, 6:07 am, mm wrote:
On Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:18:00 -0700, wrote:
On Jul 7, 3:13 am, mm wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:55:23 -0700, wrote:
On Jul 6, 8:05 pm, "Noon-Air" wrote:
wrote in message
...

Hire a *competent*, licensed, bonded, insured, professionally trained HVAC
technician, instead of depending on some flunkie handiman that couldn't make
it doing anything else.

What specifically do I ask him tomorrow? (Types of HVAC

Ask him what the problem is, and how long it will take to fix it.

Since he doesn't work for you, he may not tell you, but if you are
nice, and not the least bit snotty, he may well tell you.

Maybe ask him if it's worth repairing or not, although that is not his
decision and he may be much less willing to speculate. OTOH, if he
knows it's a 50 dollar problem, he may be wiling to speculate. But
you have to be even nicer to get answers to hard questions.
(sometimes even when you yourself are paying).

certifications?)

BTW, in practice, I don't think the guy's certifications matter. I
guess that's why I skipped this part before. He's the guy the
landlord or the AC contractor chose to send. If I were the AC
contractor, I'd want to hire someone with certification**, and if he
is going to recharge the system, I gather he must have certification,
but one can know just as much without certification as with, and the
important thing is that he diagnose the problem correctly. I don't
have much AC experience but I"ve been misdiagosed over the years by 4
medical doctors with certification, 2 of them specialists, so
certification doesn't impress me anymore.

**although if I had someone I knew knew AC, and he didn't have cert,
but was cheaper to hire, and he wasn't going to be the only tech, I'd
hire him too. He can diagnose and do other repairs, and if it needs
recharging, I'll send the certified guy.

He is being sent by the landlord, which I don't pay
for.

The landlord is required to keep the A/C working properly.

Within a reasonable time, of learning it's not working properly. I
think that is the law in all US states, unless the lease says
something different, which it most likely doesn't. NYC and many
places have more specific laws about providing heat, but I think not
about providing AC.

Are you
suggesting that underhanded behavior is so common as to be practically
expected?

I didn't suggest anything underhanded at all, on the part of the
repairman or the landlord. What words are you referring to where you
think I did?

It's often hard to get a good answer out of a repairman, whether you
are paying the bill or someone else is, and I'm not quite sure why**,
but I don't think there is anything underhanded about it, except in a
few cases that I don't think apply to you. They don't apply to you
because he's not working for you, he works for the landlord. They
probably don't apply to the landlord either, because all but the
smallest landlords are a source of repeat business for contractors.

**Probably IMO the biggest reason is, if he's not the boss of the
repair company, he doesn't want to make decisions that his employer
has the power and right to make. He doesn't want to get caught in the
middle between the customer and his boss, so he tells his boss what
the situation is, and the boss deals with the customer. In this case,
with a landlord/tenant, even if the repairman is the boss of his own
company, he won't want to get caught between his "employer", the
landlord who hires him, and the tenant. But this is not underhanded.
It's totally reasonable. And the consequences when someone does get
caught in the middle are often more than enough to keep him from ever
letting it happen again.

Pretty much the only way out of this, afaict, for the customer is to
seem like a regular guy who won't make a stink if the boss later
contradicts the employee, or the landlord contradicts the contractor,
because a regular guy understands that the boss is the boss, and the
employee can't actually make committments. Once one gives that
impression, he has to actually live up to it, or he, or she, is a
scoundrel and dishonorable.

I"m not talking about accepting shoddy work. I'm talking about asking
the guy who comes to your house what the problem is, and how long it
will take to fix it, and whether it is worth repairing it or not, and
then if and when the boss or the landlord gives one different answers,
saying, "Well the guy who was here says yada yada which contradicts
you." One shouldn't say that.

Unless it is a literal life and death matter, and I can't imagine how
that could be, one shouldn't do that. It doesn't matter what the guy
tells you when he's there. It only matters that the AC gets fixed,
and nothing the repair man SAYS to you has any effect on that.

If the guy tells you something and the boss or landlord tells you
something else, one should just suck it up and not get the guy in
trouble. If you get him in trouble -- even if he doesn't get in
trouble, but he knows a customer quoted him when the boss said
something else -- he'll never tell another customer a thing.

You may never know for sure who is right. Them's the breaks. Maybe
the techician made a mistake, and somehow the boss knows it without
even seeing the jobsite. Maybe the boss or landlord knows something
the repair guy doesn't know. Maybe the landlord plans to replace the
whole system in a year or two**, but doesn't want to say that or the
tenants will hold him to it, even if he doesn't have as much money as
he thinks he will (like if one or two apartments are unexpectedly
vacant for a while) It's not at all necessary for either to be lying
or underhanded for them to say different things.

**Maybe the landlord plans to sell the building in a year or two and
isn't willing to do all the repairs he should. I'm not saying every
landlord does everything he should or that every repairman always does
everything right. But I have no reason to think and didn't suggest
that there was anything underhanded in this case.

I just posted a description of what maintenance didn't do as a reponse
to my original post.