Confessions of an HVAC Repairman

GONZO

Closing deals behind enemy lines

By Thomas Lee · October 30, 2026 · 14 min read

After three attempts at the doorbell, my “client” finally answers. The name on my service app said Rosie,” Jewish last name, so I assumed I would be greeted by a flowy Ashkenazi matriarch as I had so many times before. Turns out Rosie is a guy, the kind who wears a robe and fuzzy slippers, Early Life TBD. I either woke him up or disturbed him from a peaceful cup of coffee. He just got back home to Los Altos Hills from his other house in Florida. He forgot I was coming. He’s gray-haired, balding, vaguely cadaverous, and, while polite, pretty much a cold fish. Within about three minutes, I’m pretty sure what character I’ll play to close the sale.

You’re in and out of a lot of people’s homes and pretty much always trying to get them to buy something. You get good at wearing different faces. Some people want you to be a grumpy, straight-to-the-point professional. Some want you to crack jokes and sneak a beer with them “as long as you don’t tell my company.” If you get lucky, you have something in common you can bond over; but if you don’t, you take something, anything, lying if you have to, and pretend so the client (the sages of sales say this word is better than “customer”) will open up their wallet. Those same sales geniuses call this “building rapport.”

Rosie seems like the type who wants grumpy professional, which is lucky for me, because it’s my natural disposition.

As a right-wing nutjob, I’m far behind enemy lines. The majority of the time, every character I play, even the grumpy pro, takes on an additional dimension: if they sniff out I’m even 1% to the right of the typical libtard, I’ll have the same chance of landing a sale as the exhumed corpse of Francisco Franco. You get good at ignoring how many old white boomers have CNN or MSNBC blaring 24/7 and handmade but fading BLM signs in their windows and “In this house…” yard signs. The Boomerlib tends to respond best to the “aw-shucks-Mayberry-friendly-neighborhood-HVAC-guy” routine combined with the full-service private equity tryhard HVAC TikTok sales guru approach—sit them down at the table, use cutesy analogies and parables to explain things to them (“Think of your insulation like a sponge…”), present them Good/Better/Best “options.”

You also get good at ignoring the bookshelves lined with Marx and Fanon and Foucault. Radical lesbian professors in Berkeley still wearing masks, with Teslas in the driveway, “I bought this before he became a Nazi” stickers. These types tend to like it when you let them in on the secret—complain about the industry, about the company price-gouging, show them where they can find a capacitor for the “real price.” They’ll, of course still pay me to do it, because they have zero DIY ability, but they need to feel like it’s their idea.

You have to ignore the African tribal statues and massive paintings of ladies with afros found in the “black middle-class” homes in the Oakland hills. Fake city or state government jobs—married couples if they’ve really got it together, but single women most of the time. Here I lay on a little performative R-E-S-P-E-C-T and offer a “discount” that’s just removing the padding from my standard pre-padded quotes.

You endure the humid stench of vomit and curry and mildew in the baking, humid hellhouses in Dublin, occupied by Chinese or Indians or Arabs who barely speak English, every available inch crammed with junk. There’s definitely a way to sell to these types, but I’ve never bothered to learn it. I use brute force, or just cut my losses.

In the downwardly mobile trans polycule hoarder dens, I just get the fuck out of as soon as I can.

Thankfully, Rosie seems to be more about business than politics as he shows me his thermostats and supply vents, but there are still “I’m a good liberal” signals scattered around, including a picture of him with Bill Clinton. His house is huge, well-maintained, lavishly decorated, but a little dated. If I had to hazard a guess at how he made his money, finance or tech, and now he’s enjoying his retirement. Guys like that—finance, tech, engineers, etc.—generally want to feel like you’ve Acknowledged Their Intellect, but it’s too early in the morning.

A few rooms have all the furniture covered by white sheets, which gives the whole place a bit of a funereal air. My heart’s not really in asking the standard roster of open-ended questions. This is called the “thermostat conversation,” which, despite the name, doesn’t have to happen at the thermostat. I fish to find something broken (the “pain point” in sales speech). Rosie stays pretty tight-lipped.

“Can you show me your returns and filters?” I ask him, since it’s information I actually need.

“Filters?” he answers. Not terribly surprised, I give him a brief explanation. I’ll track them down. Don’t worry about it.

We pass through a four-car garage on the way out to his AC units, and I notice several shelves and boxes filled with books. I put that in my back pocket for the time being, because so far that’s the only thing I’ll be able to build rapport over. He turns around to leave me to it, but before he does, I ask him, “Hey Rosie, if I notice anything during my maintenance that I think you should know about, do you want to hear about it?” This is the “participation agreement, a favorite insight of the 30-second YouTube hypebeast whiteboard HVAC hustle influencer. Despite my cynicism, the tight T-shirt brigade is kind of right. You want to make sure to use that word “notice,” too—“notice” means you’re just an honest technician; “find” means you were looking for a sale.

Rosie says, “Sure, sure,” then disappears back into the house. I head to my truck to grab my tools. One AC is about 10 years old, and I spend about five minutes confirming it’s basically fine. His other unit looks about 30 or more, and when I open it up, I immediately see a blown capacitor. Rosie will probably sneeze at the $500 we overcharge for a new one, so I figure I’ve got at least that sewn up.

On my way back in, I take my sweet time inspecting his books. There’s a lot of stuff in the line of biographies of Democrat politicians, Atomic Habits, books about Israel and Judaism, Christopher Hitchens, and a lot of “literature,” precisely zero of which I give a shit about. But I do spot a few classic sci-fi paperbacks and some history books I want, and I determine that whatever happens on this call, I’m gonna snag at least one of them. As I pass his furnaces, I take a quick glance at his water heater and notice that there are about two inches of water sitting in the drain pan. The bottom of the tank is rusted out to hell. Jackpot. I take a few quick pictures and a video. Having multiple avenues of attack is always better to land a sale than pinning all your hopes on a capacitor. And not having hot water is certainly a “pain point.”

I find his returns—no filters—then I find Rosie. He’s changed out of his robe into a navy blue suit, leaning back in a chair behind his desk, on the phone with somebody. He holds a finger up to me, and I give him a thumbs-up and pull back to hover at a respectful distance. It’s a corded landline phone that looks like it might be from the ’90s. I reflect for a moment that taking calls on a landline—I haven’t spotted a cellphone anywhere so far—is actually kind of a power move. After a few minutes, while I’m not sure, I think I overhear something about “goy” as Rosie puts the phone to his shoulder, but maybe I’m hearing things.

“So?”

“Well, Rosie, there are some things I’d like to bring to your attention,” I begin. First, I let him know neither of his returns has filters, and what sizes they are. Then I tell him that the 10-year-old unit is basically fine, then I explain what’s going on with his capacitor for the 30-year-old.

“Ah, that’s for the kids’ old wing of the house,” he says. “They’re all moved out.” Or in other words, he doesn’t care.

Shit, I think, but I don’t let it show on my face. I pivot to the water heater and show him the video of me dipping my finger in the water and splashing around a bit. “So, it’s not supposed to do that,” a joke that normally serves me well, but Rosie doesn’t crack even a half-smile. He asks me to show it to him, so I lead him down to the garage and shine a flashlight. I ask him what he wants to do. The man needs hot water, so he asks me to call one of our plumbing sales guys over to quote him a new one. I do this in front of him—another one of those trust- and rapport-building super tips from HVAC TikTok—and then let him know the plumber will be here in about forty minutes. “What’s your end of that?” he asks.

“I’ll see about 3%,” I admit. It’s always a tactical gamble to admit to receiving commission to a client, but I get the sense Rosie would see through any dissembling when it comes to monetary incentive. He nods, unperturbed.

“You want a glass of water?” he asks, heading towards his kitchen.

I’m not thirsty, but the rule is to always say yes when the client offers you a drink or a snack, so I follow him to the kitchen and thank him when he hands me the water.

Then I take my shot.

“I noticed all the books down here. You’ve got some good ones.”

Rosie casts an eye on me. “You read?” he asks me suspiciously.

“I do,” I answer, smiling. He’s not the first person to treat the possibility of an HVAC tech who reads books with skepticism. I would like to say I’m indignant at this, and there’s a small part of me that is, but given the average tech—and really the average person—I can’t blame him.

“And what do you read?”

“Mostly history, but I’m also a big sci-fi and fantasy guy.”

“History, eh? What kind?” His tone isn’t quite friendly.

“Oh, well, all sorts really. Ancient, medieval, American military history. That kind of stuff.”

“Military history?” he interrogates.

“Oh yeah.”

“The World Wars? World War II?” he continues, still staring right at me.

“…Yep, definitely.”

“Well, hey, pick out any book you want,” he says, running a hand along the spines of some of his collection. He finally seems a little relaxed.

I thank him. Oh, I couldn’t, are you sure, that’s very kind. I head towards a 1970s edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but Rosie isn’t done with me yet. He pulls a Bill Clinton biography off the shelf. “You like history, right? Would you read this?”

I would sooner use it as toilet paper for an emergency shit into a five-gallon bucket in the back of my van, but I also don’t want to jeopardize his good graces—not with the commission from a water heater sale and some paperbacks on the line. “Ah, you know, it’s not really my thing, but…” I begin.

“Yeah, you might like it,” he says, and he puts it into an empty cardboard box. This begins a chess match where he quizzes me on my interests, then every minute or so pulls out a book that seems designed to test me, and I do my best to refuse it without explicitly doing so. I get the sense he’s eagerly taking the opportunity to offload some books. Towards the end of our game, Rosie has saddled me with a Ted Kennedy biography, a Richard Dawkins book, some maudlin environmentalist climate change tract, a short story collection by some Japanese guy that feels vaguely fruity, and about a dozen other books. Plus Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country that he handed me with a conspiratorial wink, which I still don’t understand.

Finally, he grabs a huge coffee table book about wine. “How about this?”

Even if I did, I really don’t want to lug around a book heavy enough to be considered a deadly weapon.

“Oh, not really. My mom likes wine, but…”

“She does? What does she drink?”

“Uh, blends and Cabs mostly, I think.”

“Come with me, I’m gonna show you something,” he says, and without waiting to see if I’m following, he heads deeper into his house. I scratch my head but then shrug. We descend down a short staircase into a cool and dimly lit hallway with weird little statuettes set in alcoves, and a heavy, dark wooden door at the end, with a metal-reinforced frame. He opens the door.

Oh thank God, it’s just a wine cellar. Not that I have much experience with them, but it’s a pretty nice wine cellar—more like a wine cave, really. There’s a polished granite table of some sort in the center, and hundreds and hundreds of bottles lining the walls. He grabs one and hands it to me.

“Take this, give it to your mom.”

I text a photo of it later to a friend of mine who knows his wine, and he tells me it retails for about $120. While I assume that’s Rosie’s equivalent to the Bogle red blend my mom gets on sale from Safeway for about eight bucks, it’s a generous gift, and I give Rosie my thanks as he launches into a little lecture about wine, storing it, something about tannins and oak.

We head back out to the garage. He’s still lecturing, moving on to the difference between American and European reds, and I’m politely pretending to listen. Mercifully, the plumber rolls up, and I make the introductions and take the opportunity to store my loot. I come back with the standard-issue rip-you-off iPad to get some signatures from Rosie. He hands me some twenties “for lunch,” and we shake hands. I feel like an entry level shabbos goy.

I smirk as I head back to my truck, a new face perhaps unlocked to wear around a certain kind of Bay Area client, reflecting on this strange brand of noblesse oblige. I’ve been tipped and given gifts by clients before, but rarely this effusively, and with such a sudden turn in the encounter and sense of being tested and observed.

I drive about a block away, pull over to upload photos and notes to my service app, then get out to light up a cig. Putting on the act gets a little tiring, sometimes even humiliating if I think about it too hard. It’d be nice to just go around fixing what’s broken instead of trying to figure out ways to screw the client out of as much money as possible so I don’t get fired. But at least in this case, Rosie really needed work done.

On my way home, I dump all the libtard books in a parking lot donation drop box and get a text from the plumber that Rosie signed for a new water heater—about six grand, going in the next day. My mom loved the wine. Cheers, Rosie…or l’chaim, I guess.