On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:18:27 -0500, clifto wrote:

mm wrote:
It was a college neighborhood and he was sick of being treated this
way. OTOH, it was a college n'hood and one must expect that they
don't know how much repairs cost and don't have much money either.

And I am sure he diagnosed the problem in 10 seconds. I can now.

So, naturally, now you spend your life giving away that knowledge for free
to help those who don't wish to pay for it.

l had a part-time repair service for about 3 years, and iirc, no one
ever asked for details or how to fix something, Most of my customers
were students at the nearby college and my charges were low, $15 for a
B&W tv and 20 for color, plus 5 dollars more for each other separate
problem the set had.

If one had asked a simple question like I asked, , I would have told
him the answer, and expected to lose a customer, but I'm not expecting
someone who does this full time and needs the money to live on to do
that.

I remember now. I didn't leave the radio and come back for it. I got
there, he plugged it in, and he immediately told me what it was and
what it would cost. Like I said 10 seconds for diagnosis, and let's
add another 15 for the radio to warm up. If the price is too high for
me, I have no obligation to him at that point.

Now, none of the people I know, friends and neighbors, know how to fix
anything, except one guy. I tell him everything I know. And most
people try to install software, fix problems, etc. on their computers,
and I tell them everything I know.

But in my story, he yelled at me. I intended to buy the part from him
and install it myself. It was an innocent question. If he had said,
"No, I can't do that.", or even "You'll probably have trouble with
that", I either would have left the radio to be fixed, or I might have
decided that 25 dollars was in 1964 too much** to fix a simple
clock-radio. If the latter, I might have just given the radio to
him*** if he wanted it, but he yelled at me. So I took it with me.
Someone else might have just thrown it away then, but I had been
fiddling with electiricity since I was 9 years old, and I figured I
could fix it.

I don't like it when people yell at me. It was an innocent question
and all he had to say was No.


**My mother got the clock-radio free for opening up a savings account,
and I at least didn't know what the retail price was. Maybe less
than 25 dollars.

***I do give things to repairmen. This summer I gave two gas lawn
mowers to a guy a mile from here who fixes mowers. One he sold me 2
or 3 years ago, and it never worked well (He had told me at the time
that he hadn't finished working on it, but it was the only one he had
left, so I bought it), but I *gave* it back to him. I didn't ask for
my money back. And the other one worked pretty well, but stalled more
often than it should and the gas tank had just started leaking. He
fixed the first one, and probably the second already, and he has
probably sold them by now.

Remove NOPSAM to email me. Please let
me know if you have posted also.