They Quoted You $300The Part Costs $14

My name is Hank. For most of forty-one years the sign on the side of the van said Handy Hank, and it stuck, so that is what people call me. I repaired household appliances in and around Dayton, Ohio for all of those years. I started in 1984 carrying a toolbox for a man named Ray Sutter. I ran my own van from 1991 until I hung it up. Somewhere in there I stopped counting the calls.

I did not write these books to run down my own trade. Most of the men and women who do this work are honest. They show up, they find the trouble, they fix it, and they charge a fair price for knowing what they know. I would send my own mother to half the shops in this county without a second thought.

But there is another kind of outfit, and it has grown in the last fifteen years. It runs on volume. It pays its technicians on commission. It sends a man out with a diagnostic fee already collected and a quota to hit, and it teaches him a short list of sentences.

Toward the end of my working life I started keeping a notebook in the van. Not of repairs — of sentences. Things customers told me the last man had said to them. I would arrive at a house to look at a machine somebody else had already condemned, and most times there was nothing much wrong with it.

“The point is never the exact figure. The point is the gap between what the part costs and what somebody wanted to charge you for putting it in.”

So there are three books. The first teaches you to fix things. The second teaches you to listen. The third is about the decision you make before either of those matters: which machine you carry into your house in the first place.

Every fix in here has a real part, a real price, and a real outcome. I have done all of them with my own hands, most of them more times than I can count. And where the honest answer is do not touch it — call a licensed man, the book says that too. A manual that tells you everything is safe is not an honest manual. This one tells you where the line is.