Heard a customer say my dryer repair only took 20 minutes, wish they saw the 2 hours of diagnostics

I was fixing a dryer for a lady in Phoenix last Tuesday, and she told her friend on the phone that I just swapped a part in 20 minutes. She didn't see me spend 2 hours checking the drum rollers, belt, and thermal fuse before finding the seized idler pulley. Got me thinking how much of our work is invisible to people. Anyone else have customers who think repairs are just swapping parts?

3 comments

3 Comments

seanlee2d ago

Man, that hit close to home. Did a dishwasher for a guy in Scottsdale last month where I spent almost 3 hours tracking down a random electrical short in the control board. He walked in right as I was replacing a $12 relay and acted like I was ripping him off for the service call. Didn't see me pulling the whole machine apart and testing every wire with a multimeter. That's the thing about this trade, people see the 10 minute fix but never the hour of head scratching and testing. It's like a mechanic changing your oil in 15 minutes but you don't see the 2 hours they spent on the previous car. Good on you for mentioning the diagnostics part, that's where the real skill is.

margaret_gonzalez252d ago

Got a call from a lady in Tucson about her fridge not cooling, spent almost 4 hours tracking down a bad start relay on the compressor (ended up being a $15 part). She stood over my shoulder while I tested the thermistor and the main board, and the whole time she kept asking if I knew what I was doing. When I finally found it and put the new relay in, she said, "So it was just that little black thing?" and tried to haggle my labor rate. People don't get that the expensive part is knowing which little black thing to swap out, you know?

the_cameron2d ago

Last year in Mesa I had a customer watch me for almost an hour diagnosing a washing machine that wouldn't spin. Washed my hands and wrote up the estimate for a new lid switch and a worn out drive belt, and the guy goes "so you're just replacing two parts?" I told him straight up that the fifty dollar part and the twenty five dollar belt weren't what he was paying for. Spent a few minutes explaining that I already ruled out the control board, the motor, and the door lock mechanism before I even touched the lid switch. He actually nodded and said I made sense. Now I always tell people upfront that diagnostics takes the longest and that's where the real cost is.