I want to talk about the lie everybody tells themselves, including me, and tells it again the very next day.
It was June, a Tuesday, north side of Kingfisher. A man called about his upstairs not cooling. He met me in the driveway already half apologizing, because he'd told his wife I'd be in and out in twenty minutes and she'd planned the afternoon around it.
He said: it's probably just low on freon, right? Quick top-off.
I've heard that sentence a thousand times. It's never just a top-off, because refrigerant doesn't get used up, it leaks, and a leak is a hunt, and a hunt takes as long as it takes.
The driveway was hot already. The asphalt had that soft tar smell. His daughter's bike was on its side by the garage and a sprinkler was ticking next door.
I told him I'd take a look. I didn't tell him twenty minutes.
Three hours later I found the leak.
It was a pinhole in the evaporator coil, up in a coffin case in a closet, and to get to it I had to pull a return, drop the plenum, and lay across an attic joist in a hundred and twenty degrees of June heat with sweat running into my eyes.
He kept coming to the bottom of the stairs. Not impatient. Just surprised. He kept saying: I really thought this would be quick.
In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put a name to that. They called it the planning fallacy. And in 1994 three researchers, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, ran the studies that nailed it down. They had students predict when they'd finish their projects. The students gave honest, confident estimates. Then the researchers watched what actually happened.
People came in late. Way late. The students finished closer to their worst-case guess than their realistic one.
But here's the part that stops me every time.
Core line: "I quote the time jobs like it actually take, from a memory of the real ones, the ones that went sideways, not the clean one I can picture."
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