The joys of the repair business

 [ Bill Maxim wrote in 010719 MMDigest: ]

> The first thing I do when arriving to tune a player piano is to put
> a roll on and try the player, so that I will know how well it works,
> and therefore how well the customer will have a right to expect it
> to work when I am finished.  I try to foresee any possible damage
> that the process will do to rotted hoses and tubing.

> Then when the job is done, I try the player out with a roll or two,
> if possible with the customer present.  I make a surcharge for tuning
> a player piano expressly because this takes extra time, and my time
> is all I have to sell.

Exactly.  If anyone's planning on turning their hobby into an
instrument repair business, they'd do well to heed the above advice.
You must demonstrate the instrument in front of the customer both
before and after the repair.  No exceptions.

A great many surprises occur before the repair, e.g., the machine plays
fine, or it starts smoking, or the owner doesn't know how to work it,
or there are several things wrong with it that the customer didn't
anticipate, or the customer thinks that the machine will do things that
it cannot do.  After the repair, there are also surprises, e.g., there
are intermittent difficulties that didn't appear when the device was
under repair.

It's also important to remember the following tenet of the repair
business:  The Customer Is Usually Wrong.

Yup.  He doesn't know how to use the equipment.  He doesn't know what
it will or will not do.  He knows nothing about it: the wife sent him.
His brother-in-law tried to fix the thing after being fortified with
beer, but he'll never tell you that -- nobody will.

He also doesn't care about the equipment (at least its insides) nearly
as much as you do.  It's a piece of furniture to many of them.  Or the
grandkids might like to hear it someday.

The general public can be pretty tough to work with.

Mark Kinsler -
who knows little about pianos but ran Kinsler Hi-Fi Service, 1968-89.