Why service technicians tend to be grumpy

I've seen that before and I may have written on that before.

There was a period in my life when I was going around doctors like crazy trying to find a solution to losing vision with one of my eyes. I didn't find a solution, but I found out that the higher in the hierarchy the doctor, the more grumpy he or she tended to be; you were supposed to get in, follow instructions and get out; only feed information when asked and exactly as asked; free input was not much appreciated.

I later noticed I tend to develop the exact same symptom in my repair service business.

It's mostly because people tend to love talking in hope that will help them, whereas most of the time - at least in my experience - what they talk about has little or absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand.

In their laymen heads they see a connection even if there is none ("it worked 5 years and it stopped when we moved it in the kitchen, but there is surge protector there, but there's also a fridge and I was thinking....").

They shouldn't be blamed for that, but at the end of the day they come to us to have a particular problem solved at a fixed and fairly low price, which does NOT include listening to lots of guesses, let alone education on why those guesses are wrong.

And those are the mild cases.

This post , like the one before, is about one of the not so common, but more aggressive cases of human idiocy that we have to deal with and which make us grumpy.

See for yourself, directly from our email (only revision to the text is the link added to the listing on eBay that was paid for):

From: Isaiah Kanda [mailto:makoakanda@g----.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2017 12:01 AM
To: Coppell TV Repair LLC
Subject: Coppell TV Repair. Contact us

From: Isaiah Kanda - makoakanda@g----.com

I purchased a Sharp LC-42SB48UT power supply 715G4009-P1A-H20-003U / ADTVA2415SA4 off ebay from your company and all you guys sent me was a package saying "thank you for your purchase" WITHOUT the $70 item I bought from you guys, on top of that the package already says "delivered" and if this is the case I want my money back, I didn't just spend $70 fucking dollars for a week of patients for a sheet of fucking paper. Your shipping instructions Btw is horseshit and I better get this shit or you're gonna have a lawsuit on your fucking hands this is bullshit.

My TV model is: Sharp

This customer:
1) Has not read the listing or does not have the mental capacity to process it (no offense meant)
2) Has not read the follow-up email clarifying what was purchased or does not have the mental capacity to process it
3) Has not read the follow-up snail mail notification or does not have the mental capacity to process it
4) Uses profane language
5) Makes threats that are virtually baseless and even more certainly impractical as any lawsuit is going to end up costing him way more than what they've already spent.

From here on I can only make an educated guess that he won't be willing to recognize his own failures as the biggest contributing factor to the problem he's facing and will continue making demands.

You see, we like working with customers, not for customers, from which immediately follows that we are not willing to go for every customer.

What we don't want to is to end up paying for their lack of qualities, including ability to read and process information and communicate in a respectful and civilized manner.

Is that too much to ask for?

It looks like it is.

Which is why we tend to get grumpy :-)