How to waste a weekend Part 2.

So, I just have to tell you HVAC tech's are about the only segment of humans on earth that I just fucking hate. I despise those bastards. 95% of them. And, that is being generous.

There are no market forces to make those in the profession more than thieves. That's right. I said it.

First - a person probably sees someone to fix their heat once or twice in their lifetime. So, there isn't much repeat business. That means there is no incentive to not take you for as much money as possible. After all, they are never going to see your cold dumb ass again.

Second - Most people are not going to work on heaters themselves. They have like 10 fucking parts - but holy shit all those wires scare people.

Some shit about them not wanting to get electrocuted. Whatever. I am batshit nervous about electricity, and even I don't think it's that dangerous if you exercise a little care. But, since most people are nervous about that crap - it is almost impossible to find information about fixing the 20 year old furnace you have. The best information you can find is "pilot light not lighting - you need to call a professional".

Thank you professor obvious!

Third - they always have you in a vulnerable position. The heat never goes out when you can live a day or two without it. It always goes out in the evening. On the coldest day of the year. It won't ever go out in the morning on the coldest day of the year. Then you could actually pay regular overtime, instead of super quadruple overtime.

Fourth - their main incentive is to sell you a new unit. Some are more hard sell than others. But some are pretty much like "well, I guess you are going to freeze to death if you don't buy a new unit". Or "if you don't buy a new unit, I'm going to make you wish you had" by charging you so much. And oh BTW.. we at least know enough to figure out how much all the parts in all those units cost. We know how much they are marking stuff up.

So anyway - enough ranting... back to 8PM on Saturday when my heat went out. I'm not happy about it, but I'm starting to get cold - and we decide to just call someone out. Despite 90% of the HVAC tech's in the phone book advertising for "emergency service" none of them provided it. And! not only emergency service, but 24x7 support. Not one of those fuckers even had the option of having a tech paged after hours. As a matter of a fact, all of them listed normal working hours on their answering machine messages. Every - single- one, in the phone book.

So apparently in my city, if your heat goes down after 5:00, you are fucking screwed. And we were.

More later. Part 1 here.