Air Conditioner Repair

So what I’m hearing is that we should keep on talking about air conditioners on LessWrong.

This lack of reliability extends to most jobs, and it's not necessarily malice, can be incompetence, an honest mistake, but more often than not just loose feedback loops. 

My experience with physiotherapists, eye doctors and dentists was like that. According to them, I should have been unable to walk, in constant pain, nearly blind and with rotting falling out teeth some years ago, unless I did what they told me to, or even then. All of them appeared highly competent, with excellent reviews and long waiting times, and really wanting to help. 

Software development is notoriously like that, too: the difference between programmers (or teams) can be orders of magnitude in terms of performance and reliability, without any externally accessible indicators, and no reliable way to predict how things would work out on the next task. I have been on both sides of it, as someone who fixed (within days) a long-standing issue that a previous team labeled "unsolvable" after months of trying, and as someone whose weeks-long unsuccessful attempt to track down and fix an issue was put to shame by another developer who managed to get it resolved quickly and efficiently. 

The Better Business Bureau isn't actually a government authority or anything. It's Yelp before there was the internet. So report on their Yelp page, report at the BBB, sure. I've seen better traction (ie real public shaming and awareness generating) on local community sites like a Facebook group or NextDoor. 

Definitely name names.

See, your first mistake here was not to consult with John Wentworth [LW · GW] and Paul Christiano [LW(p) · GW(p)] about thermodynamics.

I bet you didn't even ring up JeffTK! [LW · GW]

So much for the rationalist virtue of scholarship..

my personal experiences with tradies/contractor of any kind are that 9/10 of them are there to get you [by charging enormous amount of money], it is extremely costly to find reliable ones and online reviews are not of much help since the consumer is unable to distinguish between good and reasonably priced work from the chaff [or maybe the online reviews are faked in the first place].

Mathews Crawford (physic graduate turned motorcycle mechanic) has an amazing little book - shopcraft as soulcraft - on the subject of blue collars jobs which are in fact not only better financially, but also more intellectually satisfying, than many a desk job in the knowledge economy.

Yeah I would do a chargeback. They didn’t provide service of any value, so you shouldn’t have to pay them.

Paul Graham's essay The Top Idea in Your Mind seems relevant. The idea in that essay is that what your mind drifts to in the shower -- the top idea in your mind -- is really important. PG also notes that disputes like this air conditioner thing are doubly costly: 1) on the object level and 2) because they replace whatever cool thing would have been the top idea in your mind.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

So then, paying attention to it seems like a bad idea.

Of course, that's easier said than done. I personally am dealing with a bait-and-switch type of thing from a moving company right now and it's a battle to not pay attention to it.

Since you seem to have a bit of a following, and I would guess more than a few are in your area, posting the experience on various social media, BBB and local review sites is probably good. Might get something to go viral and that will provide the negative press the rather sketchy actor needs -- and will help others avoid.

I don't think you can really recoup any payments to the first company as you agreed to that beforehand. Consider it a "learning experience". However, given the price and the apparent attempt to deceive/grossly over charge you might be able to report it to you local government. I would check with both your local representative and whatever local consumer protection department might exist. In Fairfax County VA, where I live, a commission exists.  Once of the powers/duties it has"

May hold public hearings on and publish its findings on issues of widespread public interest which deal with illegal, fraudulent, deceptive, or dangerous consumer practices. May adopt, promulgate, amend, and rescind rules and regulations, subject to the approval of the Board of Supervisors, concerning such issues.

I think you are correct, any business practice that amounts to a situation of double billing should be a huge warning flag. I always start the conversation with "I'm calling to get a ball park estimate for <my problem>." Most repair shops with then tell you what they will charge to come look but seldom be able to give a really good number. I will try to talk with at least 3 difference businesses. If one seems both reasonable and the conversation goes well (created some sense of trustworthiness) I will make schedule the initial check. If not, back to the drawing board as they say.

I will also use such a service call to assess the service personnel and the company. If they are good I will often inquire into things like service contracts (for something like HVAC systems) to perform periodic maintenance work and will generally also enjoy some type of purchase discount pricing for work done and replacement of systems when needed. (My situation may be a bit different though as I'm in a single family house with a central HVAC system not wall/window units.)

Also - can be good to tell contractors up front that you're planning to get 2-3 quotes on whatever job it is. That way they're less likely to pull something crazy if they know that you're shopping around a bit

Yeah definitely seen some huge variation in quotes for one off jobs. Just now got a custom shelf made - one carpenter wanted 1500 Shekel, the other 500.

We have a WhatsApp group with everyone English speaking who lives in my area, and standard practice is to ask what kind of numbers other people got. Serves as a very good way to get some sort of baseline.

Always get a second quote. Otherwise, you have infinite sample variance. See Bessel's Correction.

"but they hadn’t completed the necessary certificate of insurance to be let into the building" - Just a random side point. In the UK many of us hold two, simultaneous and contradictory veiws of the US. The first is "they let you do just about anything there, you can even buy a gun!". The other is "the whole place is drowning in random needless restrictions stopping you from doing basic things. You can get fined for not having and mowing a lawn!"

Needing to complete a certificate before a repair-person can even step over your doormat to just look at a problem, now that is a really giant data point on the second one.

It's helpful to the community to file a report with the BBB. And next time check the references there rather than trusting the super's recommendations.

What am I supposed to do now? Chargeback?

If you want your money back, sure. The alternative is to fight a company experienced at not giving refunds.

As for warning the community, this kind of thing happens all over the place all the time in all kinds of industries. Complaints to BBB and Yelp tend to be famously ineffective although possibly will demonstrate good citizenship to those who don't know better. Overall, this post is a bit confusing--it's like someone from a completely different society was suddenly transported to modern USA. What are you asking / telling us?