Format: Post-call

Long day. Five calls. I'm thinking about the fourth one.

He's been a customer for seven years. I've been to his house probably a dozen times. The system I put in , a Trane, two-stage, went in during a rough August , he's had me back for tune-ups, a blower motor three years ago, a condensate drain blockage last spring. We've talked over the work every time. He's always pleasant. Always glad to see me.

Every single time, when I reintroduce the context of what I did last visit, he listens like it's new information. Because for him, it is.

Today he asked me: now what was the issue last time you came out?

Blower motor, I told him. Three years ago.

Oh right, right. He said it the way people say it when they're being polite, not when they actually remember.

He's not the only one like this. Over forty-five years I've met a lot of people who don't retain the specifics of what was done to their system. Most customers don't. That's expected. But there's a category of customer where it's not just the HVAC history , they don't retain names, they don't retain details from conversations, they apologize for it, and they've apologized for it their whole lives in a way that tells you it's a thing they've been made to feel bad about.

He said: I'm sorry, I'm terrible with this stuff. I have a terrible memory.

He said it like it was a character defect. Not a quirk. Something he'd been told about himself and had started to believe.

There's a study that explains this clearly and it's worth knowing. Researchers McWeeny and Ellis ran it in 1987. They called it the Baker Baker paradox. They told one group that a person in a photograph was a baker , someone who bakes bread for a living. They told another group that the same person's name was Baker. Later, the people who learned the occupation remembered it easily. The people who learned the surname mostly couldn't retrieve it.

Same word. Completely different retention.

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Format: Post-call (and post-evening, post-next-morning)

This one takes more than one sitting to tell. It spans an afternoon and an evening and the next morning, and none of it is bad. I want to be clear about that upfront. The customer was fine. The repair was fine. But I got three contacts in eighteen hours after a call that went completely normally, and that's the thing I want to think about.

The call was a capacitor replacement. Outdoor unit not starting. Classic presentation, quick diagnosis, fifteen-minute repair. I showed him the readings, showed him the part, ran the system through a full cycle, everything came up clean. He thanked me. I drove away.

That was around two in the afternoon.

At six he texted. He said the unit was running fine but he was noticing a sound he wanted to ask about. He described it in detail. It was the sound of a system that's been off for weeks running properly. Normal startup expansion in the lines. I texted back and told him so.

He replied: okay. That makes sense. Thank you.

At nine he called. He said he was sorry to bother me this late, he just wanted to double-check that the capacitor he'd been running with had been bad enough to actually need replacing, because he'd been reading some things online and he was wondering if maybe the readings were borderline.

I told him the readings. I told him what borderline meant. I told him what I'd found.

He said: okay, yeah, I figured. I just wanted to confirm.

The next morning he texted again. He said: everything's running great. I think I was just overthinking it last night. Sorry for the late call.

I've seen this before. Not often, but I've seen it. The repair is done. The system is working. But something in the customer won't quite settle. They come back to the thing, turn it over, come back again. Not because they suspect wrongdoing. Because they can't stop running the scenario.

What they're doing , and they usually know they're doing it , is cycling through the same questions without being able to land. Did I make the right call letting him replace it? What if it would have run another few months? Is that sound normal? What if that sound means something?

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🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Format: Post-call

Long drive home. It's getting dark. I stopped for coffee. This one I want to think through slowly because it was a good call, an unusual one, and I don't get them this good very often.

He called about a condenser unit that had been making noise. Not the noise I usually hear about , the bang on startup, the rattle in the blower , this was a high-pitched hum that came and went. He'd noticed it had been worse on humid days. He told me that on the phone.

Most customers don't notice things like that. Or they notice and don't think to say it. He'd noticed, connected it to weather conditions, and led with it.

I already knew a little about what I was walking into.

Fan motor bearing starting to go. Classic presentation, the hum varies with load and ambient humidity affects how the motor runs under stress. I confirmed it, gave him my read, explained what was happening. And then he asked a question I don't get every call.

He asked: why does humidity make it worse?

I told him. When ambient humidity is high the motor works harder to maintain airflow because denser air offers more resistance, and a bearing that's already degraded throws heat under load, which accelerates wear.

He nodded. Then he said: so it's like how a car engine runs hotter when you've got the AC on in August.

That's exactly what it's like. That's a very good analogy.

He seemed pleased by that. Not because I'd confirmed he was right. Because the thing had clicked.

He asked questions through the whole repair. Not the anxious kind, not the kind designed to catch me doing something wrong. Just genuine questions. He wanted to know why the bearing fails before the motor does on most units. He wanted to know how I know from the tone whether it's the bearing or the shaft. He asked what refrigerant has to do with motor load.

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We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Format: Post-call

Headed back in. Late afternoon. The kind of call you replay not because anything went wrong but because something in it was unusual and I'm still trying to name it.

She called because her system had been short-cycling. Turning on, running a few minutes, cutting off, doing it again. You learn to hear that one over the phone. Nine times out of ten it's a dirty filter or a refrigerant issue. This one turned out to be a faulty pressure switch.

When I got there she was waiting at the door. Normal enough. But the way she watched me come up the walk was different. Not anxious. Not suspicious in the way some customers are suspicious. More like she was already doing something. Collecting data.

I said hello and she said hello back and then she said something nobody had ever said to me in forty-five years of walking into people's houses. She said: you look like someone who's been doing this a long time.

She said: yeah, I could tell by how you looked at the unit when you pulled up.

The diagnosis took maybe twenty minutes. Pressure switch confirmed, I'd seen a dozen of them this season. I quoted the repair while I was still looking at the unit, not at her, just explaining what I'd found and what it would run.

And she said: you paused before the price.

She wasn't wrong. I had. Not because the number was inflated or I was unsure. Just the half-second that comes before any number, the breath you don't notice you're taking.

She wasn't accusing me of anything. She was just telling me she'd seen it. Like it was a fact she was noting for the record.

I told her yeah, I probably did, it's a habit. And then I quoted the number and we moved on. But something in that moment had changed. She'd shown me something about how she moves through a service call. She wasn't there to watch the equipment. She was watching me.

Not every customer like this is difficult. That's the important thing.

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Format: Post-call

Heading back toward town. Windows down. It's one of those calls that doesn't feel like anything went wrong but I keep thinking about it anyway.

She called for a tune-up. End of May, system hadn't run much yet, wanted it checked before summer. Straightforward call on paper.

When I pulled up she was standing in the doorway. Not waiting outside the way some people do, not watching from behind a curtain the way others do. Just standing there. Neutral. She said hello and showed me to the unit and then stood back about ten feet and watched.

I've learned to pay attention to where people position themselves on a call. She wasn't hovering. She wasn't leaving. She was watching.

Tune-up went normal until I got to the capacitor. It was reading low. Not failed, but marginal. The kind of reading where you can either call it fine and come back in two months when it trips, or you can replace it now and not think about it again for five years. I give people both options. Most of the time they want the second one.

I told her what I found. Showed her the reading on the meter. Explained what marginal meant, what it would likely do over the summer, what replacing it now would cost.

She looked at the meter. Looked at me. And then she said fine.

But she said it quietly. And she looked away when she said it.

I've heard people say fine on service calls in a lot of different ways. Fine that means great, let's do it. Fine that means I'm annoyed but go ahead. Fine that means I'm not going to fight you on this right now but I'm also not completely with you.

That was the third one.

I didn't push. I didn't go back over the numbers. I didn't ask if she had questions because sometimes asking if someone has questions when they've already gone quiet just puts pressure on them to perform okayness they don't feel.

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Format: Post-call

On my way home and I'm trying to figure out how to describe this one. Nothing went wrong. The system's running. She seemed satisfied when I left. But there was something about the call that I'm still placing.

She'd called about a unit that wasn't cooling. Refrigerant leak, as it turned out. Short answer version: found the leak, confirmed the charge was low, quoted the repair, she agreed, I did the work, took my readings, everything came in.

But the call was strange in a way I can't fully attribute to the technical side.

When I arrived she was in the kitchen and she came to the door a beat after I knocked, and she had the look of someone who's just returned from somewhere. Not sleepy. Not distracted by her phone. Just the quality of someone surfacing from a particular depth.

She showed me to the unit and stood back. I explained what I was doing as I diagnosed it. She nodded.

When I found the leak and came back to tell her, I walked her through it. Showed her on the line set where the oil staining was. Explained what it meant in terms the repair.

Then she asked me to repeat it.

Not because she hadn't heard. The way she asked, it was almost like she'd heard it but it hadn't landed somewhere it could stick. She said: I'm sorry, can you say that again? I was thinking about something.

I went through it again. She nodded. This time she asked a couple of questions. Good questions, specific. She understood it fine when she was in it.

We agreed on the repair. I went to the truck. When I came back she was in a different room from where I'd left her. She came back toward the unit when she heard me. Same quality again , surfacing.

I've thought about what to call this over the years and I've never quite landed on the word. It's not distraction in the ordinary sense. Distraction is when someone's phone pulls them away or they're listening to something. This is different. This is someone who spends a significant portion of their time somewhere else inside themselves.

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

I've been around long enough to know that some folks just feel everything more than the rest of us. The hum from the air handler, the whoosh from a register, the clicking of a contactor. To them it's not background noise, it's a presence in the house.

Had a service call out near Hennessey last spring. Lady met me at the door before I even knocked. Said her new system was driving her crazy, that she could hear it from every room. Her husband said it sounded normal to him. She wasn't making it up. She was tuned in differently.

I checked the install. Ductwork was tight, blower was set to a higher tap than the old system needed, and they'd put a return right above her reading chair. To most people, fine. To her, intolerable.

Dropped the blower one tap, added a small piece of acoustic liner inside the return boot, and shifted the diffuser deflection. Same system, same tonnage, totally different room. She told me a week later it was the first time the house had felt like hers since the old unit went out.

The psychology word for what she has is sensory processing sensitivity. About fifteen to twenty percent of people are wired this way. They register sound, light, temperature swings, and air movement at a finer grain than the rest of us. In our trade we have to take that seriously, because comfort isn't an average. It's what the person sitting in that chair feels.

What I learned from that call is that I can't size a job off a load calc alone. I have to ask who lives there and what they notice. The sensitive ones are usually the ones who tell me the truth about how a system is really running.

Core line: "Comfort isn't an average. It's what the person sitting in that chair feels."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A Tuesday afternoon in August. Compressor seized on a 19-year-old system in a brick ranch south of Kingfisher.

A woman at her kitchen table said okay. Said okay again. Then her eyes went somewhere past the table and didn't come back.

Not crying. Not angry. Not weighing the numbers. Just absent.

Most customer service training covers two states: mad and scared. There's a third. Dr. Stephen Porges named it polyvagal shutdown. Forty-five years in, Dave had been recognizing it by feel for decades before it had a word.

What Dave learned on that call: pushing harder is the worst available move. Shrinking the ask is the only thing that works.

Core line: "The body knows when it's safe again. Your job, if you're sitting across the table, is not to be the thing it's still scared of."

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Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true

🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

I want to talk about a call from a long time ago. Thirty-something years. I still know the address.

July. Late twenties, maybe twelve years in the trade, sent out alone on what should have been a routine call. Older woman, eighties, living by herself a few miles east of town. System had quit. Her daughter called it in.

She met me at the door. First thing she said: I wasn't going to call. My daughter made me. When I asked why, she said, I didn't want to be a bother.

The house was a hundred and four degrees. She'd been in it for two days.

Failed contactor. Twenty-minute repair. I sat with her a few minutes longer than I needed to, until the house started to come down. Then I sat in my truck before I started it. Wasn't doing anything. Just sitting.

Brown and Kulik named it flashbulb memory back in 1977: emotional intensity plus personal relevance plus surprise, and the brain encodes differently. David Pillemer in 1998 extended it to what he called momentous events: ordinary memories that keep surfacing for decades because something in them is still working on you.

I went back the next week. Not for a service call. Just to check. She was surprised. She lived another four years. Every time I came back she'd say, I hope I'm not keeping you.

Core line: "Most of it becomes the trade. Some of it becomes the reason. That one became the reason."

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Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true

🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
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LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

About two years ago, someone left me a five star review that I couldn't place.

It wasn't that I couldn't remember the customer. I couldn't quite recognize the interaction they described. The review said I was patient during a difficult conversation about whether to repair or replace, that I took the time to explain the economics, that they felt respected the whole way through.

I read it three times. I thought, is this me? Is this a call I'd remember?

I think it was. But the version in the review felt more considered than what I remembered doing. I remembered a routine repair-or-replace conversation, the kind I have dozens of times a year. What she remembered was something she'd needed and received.

Dan McAdams at Northwestern has spent decades on what he calls narrative identity: the stories we tell about our lives aren't recordings, they're constructions. Frederic Bartlett's 1932 work on memory reconstruction said the same thing: we rebuild events from fragments, shaped by what we brought into the room.

She'd been carrying something difficult. So when I did the routine thing, it landed in a context that made it significant. My version of the call is colored by forty-five years of the same conversation. Hers is colored by the day she actually had.

Core line: "For me it was Tuesday afternoon between the third and fourth stop. For them it was the whole arc."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 45+ 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.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true

🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite

🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.