Format: Post-call

This is episode fifty. I want to do something different with it.

I want to tell you about the time I almost lost a customer , not because of a bad diagnosis or a pricing dispute , but because I was tired and I let it show.

Five days in. Six calls a day. It had been the worst stretch of the summer , back to back, emergency to emergency, every job had something unexpected in it, three of them had gone long. I was running on four hours of sleep. My back was doing the thing it does sometimes when I've been in crawl spaces for two days. I had two more calls that Friday and I was going to make it through them because I always make it through them.

The second-to-last call was a diagnostic. System not cooling. Simple on paper. When I got there and pulled the panels it was immediately clear this was going to be a refrigerant leak that would take the better part of an hour, maybe more, and I had one more call after this one.

She was a new customer. Never used me before. Got my number from a neighbor.

She was nervous. The kind of nervous where she was trying not to seem nervous , asking questions quickly, correcting herself mid-sentence, apologizing for things that didn't need apologizing for. Under normal circumstances I'd have slowed down, taken my time, let the call develop at the pace she needed.

I was not at my best.

Charles Figley spent decades studying what happens to people who care for other people , caregivers, therapists, emergency responders, social workers. He coined the term compassion fatigue in 1995. What he documented is distinct from burnout, which is about depletion through workload. Compassion fatigue is about the specific cost of sustained empathic engagement. Being genuinely present with other people's distress, over time, without adequate restoration, depletes the capacity to be present.

You can still do the technical work. The diagnostic, the repair, the readings , those don't suffer first. What suffers first is the capacity to read the room, to slow down when someone needs you to slow down, to bring your whole self to the human dimension of the call.

I was doing the repair right. I was not reading the room right.

I gave her a quote and she said she wanted to think about it.

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