This is more of a rant than anything.
I'm 29 years old, I have been in the AC industry since I was 16. I've been a tech for 10 years, and a business owner for 2.
I have never had to leave a customer hanging like this, so I thought I'd share my first experience. Maybe you could share your worst ones too!
I went to do a service call after hours, and didn't charge this guy any additional service fee since it was close by.
It was quite an upscale mainly black neighborhood, giant and new houses everywhere. I had no idea this place existed because I guess it's been built in the past 10 years.
Anyway, as I'm entering the neighborhood, I'm waving, friendly and smiles to everyone, all I get is evil stares back, That probably should have been my sign to turn around.
To put it in perspective, I live in Alabama, where almost everyone is friendly, regardless of class, color, or creed.
Customer was not there, but his daughter was. Upon arrival I found a bad transformer, blown low voltage fuse, and a wire arcing to the cabinet inside the airhandler.
I changed the transformer, fixed wire, andreplaced fuse with a resettable after finding out there was still a LV short.
In between changing transformer and fuse, he called 7 different times while i'm ruling out LV components and I'm sweating balls in an attic.
He spent more time questioning me than letting me diagnose the unit,
I got pretty annoyed at this and stopped answering.
Before I could start ohming thermostat wires his daughter came up to me with a phone in her hand.
"Is it this, is it that, are you licensed and bonded, could it be this, can you finish this in an hour, it's getting dark and I don't think we're getting anywhere. Can you tell me what it is yet?" all while im STILL sweating balls, meter in hand, checking if thermostat wires may be broken.
I told him patience is a virtue, and that I would be buttoning up the unit, writing him a service ticket of what I found so far.
I didn't even charge him for the transformer.
I suppose one good thing about owning the business is you can pick and choose your clients.
I won't be back there, you couldn't pay me enough.
THE CUSTOMER IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT