A woman in Dover told me, right after I condemned her compressor, that she had known all along it was going to go out this summer. She said she had felt it. She said the unit had been telling her since spring.
I asked her, gently, what the unit had been telling her back in spring. She thought about it. She said it had been making a different sound. She could not say what kind of different.
Baruch Fischhoff wrote about this in 1975. He had people read about historical events, then estimate how likely each outcome had been. The ones who were told the outcome first rated it as far more inevitable than the ones who were not, and even when he told them to ignore what they knew, they could not. He called it creeping determinism. Once a thing has happened, it looks like the only thing that could have happened.
That is hindsight bias, and I see it after almost every major failure. Before the compressor quit, those spring sounds were the background noise of a system running normally. After it quit, every quiet click and odd hum became, in memory, a warning. The unit really had been making sounds. Most units make sounds. The failure is what made those particular ones significant, after the fact.
I have to be careful here. She was reporting something true about herself, that she pays attention to her house and she does hear things. I do not want to flatten that. So I do not tell her she could not have known. I tell her she was paying attention, that she picked up on something. Then I say, softly, that even with my gauges and my training I could not have told her in March that this was the summer it would go. Nobody could.
The harder version is the customer who turns it on themselves, who decides after a failure that they were careless for not acting, that it is their fault. It is not. A compressor fails after fifteen or twenty years of cycles because it was always going to, not because someone missed a sign that was never loud enough to catch.
What she was really after, I think, was a little agency in a moment that had stripped her of it. I let her keep her version of having known, I make sure the replacement gets done right, and I drive away thinking about Fischhoff and how, once a thing has happened, the mind can no longer remember that it had not yet happened.
Core line: "The failure converted the unease into a specific premonition. The premonition was not specific at the time."
Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.
We're family-run and powered by 47+ years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.
๐ ๏ธ Book Online:
Book Online
๐ www.hartzellsheatair.com
๐ (405) 375-4822
๐ Trane Comfort Specialist โข Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer โข ClimateMaster Elite
๐ก๏ธ VIP Comfort Club โข Remote Monitoring โข Extended Warranties
๐ฒ Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell
Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.