The AC Repair We Both Swore Would Be Quick

I want to talk about the lie everybody tells themselves, including me, and tells it again the very next day.

It was June, a Tuesday, north side of Kingfisher. A man called about his upstairs not cooling. He met me in the driveway already half apologizing, because he'd told his wife I'd be in and out in twenty minutes and she'd planned the afternoon around it.

He said: it's probably just low on freon, right? Quick top-off.

I've heard that sentence a thousand times. It's never just a top-off, because refrigerant doesn't get used up, it leaks, and a leak is a hunt, and a hunt takes as long as it takes.

The driveway was hot already. The asphalt had that soft tar smell. His daughter's bike was on its side by the garage and a sprinkler was ticking next door.

I told him I'd take a look. I didn't tell him twenty minutes.

Three hours later I found the leak.

It was a pinhole in the evaporator coil, up in a coffin case in a closet, and to get to it I had to pull a return, drop the plenum, and lay across an attic joist in a hundred and twenty degrees of June heat with sweat running into my eyes.

He kept coming to the bottom of the stairs. Not impatient. Just surprised. He kept saying: I really thought this would be quick.

In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put a name to that. They called it the planning fallacy. And in 1994 three researchers, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, ran the studies that nailed it down. They had students predict when they'd finish their projects. The students gave honest, confident estimates. Then the researchers watched what actually happened.

People came in late. Way late. The students finished closer to their worst-case guess than their realistic one.

But here's the part that stops me every time.

Core line: "I quote the time jobs like it actually take, from a memory of the real ones, the ones that went sideways, not the clean one I can picture."

---

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run, and powered by 45+ years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Think about that quick errand you ran last weekend. You know, uh the one that was supposed to take 20 minutes, absolute maximum. You grab your keys and you tell someone in your house, I'm just running to the hardware store for one specific screw. I'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Right. Famous last words.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Exactly. And then mysteriously, that one little test just completely consumes your entire Saturday afternoon. I mean, you hit unexpected traffic, or you know, the store reorganized the hardware aisle.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Or you just bought the wrong thread size and you have to go all the way back.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Right. And before you realize what's actually happening, the sun is going down and your entire day is just gone. We all do this constantly. And the strangest part is that we never seem to learn from the experience.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

We really don't. It is a remarkably persistent blind spot for us. We are essentially dealing with a universal human inability to accurately forecast time. And it's driven by some very specific and frankly bizarre psychological mechanisms.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Aaron Powell So to figure out why our brains constantly lie to us about time and how we can finally break this cycle of broken promises, we are doing a deep dive today into a really fascinating reflection. It's titled The Job That Was Never an Hour.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah, written by Dave Hartzel. He's a master HVAC technician based in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and he has 45 years of experience doing this work.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

45 years. So to really get into this, we need to leave your weekend errands behind for a second and travel to a very specific, uh, sweltering Tuesday in June, right in the middle of an Oklahoma driveway.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Oh man, it's the absolute perfect environment to watch this psychological trap just spring shut. So Dave pulls his work truck into this driveway, and it is blisteringly hot. You know that soft tar smell coming off the asphalt. There's a kid's bike on the lawn, a sprinkler's ticking next door.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Really setting the scene there.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Right. And the customer comes out to meet him, and he's already sort of half apologizing because he's made a promise to his wife that he basically can't keep.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Right. The customer tells Dave that he told his wife the repair would only take 20 minutes. Like they've planned their entire afternoon around this assumption.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Which is wild.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

It is. And the customer looks at Dave and says, Oh, it's probably just low on Freon, right? Just a quick top-off. Which uh, based on Dave's reflection, is an immediate red flag.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Oh, absolutely. Refrigerant doesn't just get used up like gas in a car engine. If a closed system is low on Freon, it means it's leaking.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Aaron Powell And finding a leak isn't a top-off, it's a hunt.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

But Dave, you know, he doesn't validate the 20-minute time frame. He just says he'll take a look, and then the reality of the machinery just takes over.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah, cut to three hours later, and the situation is just brutal. Dave has had to pull a return, and he's literally laying across an attic joist in 120 degrees of punishing June heat.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

With sweat just pouring into his eyes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

And just to make sure we're all picturing this correctly, because the jargon here really tells a story on its own. When Dave says he's dropping a plenum, we're talking about dismantling the main sheet metal box that distributes the airflow for the whole house. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Right. He's pulling apart the fundamental architecture of the system. Yeah. And he ultimately finds the actual problem inside what's called a coffin case, which is this tightly sealed, heavily insulated metal housing holding the evaporator coils.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

So it's awful.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

It's dark, it's cramped, and inside this metal box, he finally locates a tiny pinhole leak in an 11-year-old coil.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

So throughout this massive three-hour ordeal, the customer keeps coming to the bottom of the stairs. And Dave makes a very specific observation about the guy's demeanor. He notes that the customer wasn't actually impatient or angry.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

No, he was just continuously surprised. He just kept repeating, I really thought this would be quick.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Right. Because the distress the customer felt wasn't about the complexity of dropping a plenum or the heat or even the eventual cost of replacing an old coil.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

No, the distress was entirely located in the gap. The gap between his highly confident 20-minute prediction and the three-hour reality playing out up in his attic. That specific psychological friction is what was causing him grief.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Okay, but I have to push back on the premise here for a second.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Because when I read about a homeowner totally misjudging a major HVAC repair, my very first instinct is that this is just a simple lack of technical expertise.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Aaron Powell You think he just doesn't know what he's talking about?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Exactly. The guy doesn't know what a coffin case is, he uh doesn't know how refrigerant works. So why are we viewing this as a profound cognitive phenomenon rather than just a naive customer who doesn't understand air conditioning?

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Aaron Powell Well, it's really tempting to dismiss it as technical ignorance. I get that. But behavioral science completely contradicts that assumption.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Aaron Powell Really? How so?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Because the customer wasn't being uniquely foolish. He was executing a perfectly normal, highly predictable cognitive error that experts do just as frequently as novices.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Wait, experts do this too.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Oh, all the time. Behavioral economists have actually been tracking this exact mechanism for decades. They call it the planning fallacy.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Aaron Ross Powell The Planning Fallacy, right. That was first introduced in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Traversky, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Yeah, exactly. Kahneman and Tversky named the phenomenon. They pointed out that human beings are just fundamentally flawed when it comes to forecasting our own tasks.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Aaron Ross Powell But the mechanics of the fallacy, like the real how and why behind it, that was nailed down later, right? In 1994.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Yes, by three researchers, Roger Bueller, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross. They published this huge paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Okay, and what did they actually do?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Aaron Ross Powell So they ran an experiment on college students. They asked them to predict when they would finish their upcoming academic projects.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Like a thesis or a term paper.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Exactly. And they asked for highly specific estimates. Like the students had to provide honest, confident estimates of their completion times, but they also asked them for a realistic guess and a worst-case scenario guess.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Okay, so they had a best line.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Right. And then the researchers just sat back and tracked the actual completion times.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

And let me guess. The students missed the deadlines by a mile.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

By a country mile, yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

But I mean, simply procrastinating or being late on a college paper isn't exactly a scientific breakthrough, is it? We all did that.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

No, you're right. But the breakthrough is found in the margins of those guesses. Because the students' actual finishing times weren't just past their confident estimates, they were much closer to their hypothetical worst-case scenarios.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Oh wow. So their confident guess was practically a fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Total fantasy. And here is where the mechanics of the fallacy really take shape. Bueller and his team asked these same students to reflect on their personal history.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

What do you mean? Like past papers.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah. And the students readily admitted, and they clearly remembered, being late on nearly everything they had ever done in the past.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Wait, so they had the historical data, they knew their own track record of failure?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

That's exactly it. They had all the historical evidence right there in their working memory. And yet, when looking at the task directly in front of them, they confidently predicted they would be on time.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

That is wild.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

It is the defining hallmark of the planning fallacy. It is a failure that survives experience.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

You know, it's almost like having a highly specific mental spam filter.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

A spam filter. How so?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Well, think about it. A normal spam filter aggressively blocks junk mail to keep your inbox clean, right? But it sounds like your brain has a spam filter that accidentally blocks all your memories of past scheduling failures, like the exact second you sit down to plan your week.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Oh, that is a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Right. Like you pull out your calendar and your brain immediately quarantines all those memories of missing deadlines. It just convinces you that today you are a perfectly efficient machine.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Exactly. The historical data is completely quarantined. But then we have to ask why. Like why would the brain intentionally blind itself to useful historical data?

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Because it wants us to feel good.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Sort of. The answer actually lies in the mechanics of how we mentally simulate the future. When we plan a job, whether it's writing a term paper, fixing an air conditioner, or you know, running to the hardware store, we build a little movie in our heads of how the task will unfold.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Right, a perfectly smooth movie, just a straight line from start to finish.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Like you picture getting to the hardware store, the screw you need is right at the front, there's no line at the register, and every traffic light on the way home is green.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

We construct this perfectly smooth movie and we completely leave out everything that goes wrong. But the important thing is we don't do this out of malice or even blind optimism.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

We don't.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

No, we do it because of cognitive limitations. By definition, we cannot picture unforeseeable surprises in advance.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Uh, right, because they're unforeseeable.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Exactly. You cannot mentally budget time for dropping a screw down a floor vent or finding a pinhole leak in a coffin case, because those are unknowns. You don't know they're going to happen until they do.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

So in cognitive psychology, this is framed as the clash between the inside view and the outside view, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yes, perfectly said. The brain strongly defaults to the inside view. It hyperfixates on the specific granular mechanics of the task directly in front of it.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

It builds a step-by-step narrative.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

And the human brain loves a coherent narrative. It really does. It rewards you with a sense of control and confidence when you visualize a successful plan.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Okay, so if the inside view is getting lost in the optimistic step-by-step narrative of the immediate task, the outside view must mean what? Stepping back? Like looking at the cold, hard statistical averages of the past.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Spot on. It is consulting the base rate. The outside view ignores the specific details of the current task entirely. Instead, it looks at the statistical reality of how similar tasks generally resolve.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

But we don't like doing that.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

We hate doing that. The brain resists the outside view because it literally feels bad. Looking at past failures offers no immediate action plan. It just creates cognitive dissonance.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

So the brain just feeds you the inside view to protect you.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, it is an intoxicating illusion.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Which brings us right back to Dave in the Oklahoma Heat. Because the most striking part of his reflection is his admission that after 45 years in the trade, I mean, after running nearly 90,000 service calls, his gut still hands him the exact same smooth movie.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yes. Even Dave.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

He pulls up to a house, looks at a unit, and his brain instantly whispers, Oh, this is a simple one. An hour, tops. His highly trained gut is running the exact same delusion that the naive customer's gut was running.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Which firmly establishes that the planning fallacy is a hardwired cognitive feature. It is not a bug of an experience.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Because if experience alone could fix it, a technician with 90,000 repetitions would be completely immune, and he's not.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Which honestly feels a little despairing. Like if an expert with almost a hundred thousand repetitions under his belt still automatically gets handed this delusional smooth movie by his own brain, it feels like the rest of us are hopelessly doomed to be late for the rest of our lives.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

It really does.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

I mean, are we just hardwired for toxic optimism?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Well, it is easy to look at the persistence of the fallacy and feel pessimistic. Because we cannot stop the brain from running the projector. The smooth movie is always going to play.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

But Dave's 45 years of experience offer a highly practical framework for what we do after the movie plays. We can't stop the movie, but we can actively choose to stop believing it.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Ah, okay. So what's the crucial misstep then?

SPEAKER_00 11:33

What Dave points out is the ultimate trap is taking that smooth movie your brain just handed you and quoting it out loud to other people.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Oh man. Yeah. Putting the fantasy out into the world.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Exactly. Let's run the alternate scenario for a second. Imagine Dave had agreed with the customer in the driveway.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Okay. He looks at the unit, his gut inside view says it looks simple, so he just validates the customer's prediction.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Right. He says, sure thing, 20 minutes, and I'm out of here.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

The moment he says that out loud, every single minute past that 20-minute mark feels to the customer like a total failure.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Trevor Burrus Exactly. It feels like Dave is incompetent or he's moving too slowly or that the unit is disastrously broken. When in reality, the reality is that finding a pinhole leak in an evaporator coil is a completely normal standard repair procedure. Nothing actually went wrong with the job itself.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

The work just proceeded exactly as the work demands.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yes. But the technician has inherited the customer's planning fallacy.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Oh, that's such a good way to phrase it. He inherited the fallacy.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

He takes a totally normal, honest repair and turns it into a broken promise. Dave actually sums this up with an incredible line in his reflection. He says, it was a three-hour job wearing a 20-minute face.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Wow, a three-hour job wearing a 20-minute face.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

That's the face of the smooth movie slapped onto the messy reality of the work.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

And if Dave had promised it would be quick, he would have spent his whole afternoon as the guy who is running behind, stressing out the customer, and ruining their afternoon plans. So what is Dave's ultimate fix? How does he handle it now?

SPEAKER_00 13:12

He's trained himself to manually override the inside view and quote from the outside view.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

So he doesn't quote the time the job looks like it will take right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Never. Instead, he quotes the time that jobs like this actually take, drawing from his mental database of the ones that went sideways, the ones where he was sweating in a 120-degree attic.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

He actively bypasses that mental spam filter we talked about. He forces himself to look at the junk mail of his past experiences.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Precisely. He consults the historical base rate and he just ignores the clean picture his imagination provides.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Does he have a specific way he says this to the customer?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, he even shares a specific script for how to handle the customer in the driveway. When the homeowner says, quick top-off, right? Dave replies, might be. And if it is, great, you'll get a nice surprise. But let's plan like it's a leak because it usually is.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Let's plan like it's a leak because it usually is.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

I love that. And you know, that framework maps perfectly onto literally anyone's daily life.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

I mean, think about your own work. When you tell your boss you'll have a massive data spreadsheet done by noon, or when you text your partner and say, I'm leaving the office now, I'll be home in 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

But you haven't even packed your bag yet.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Right. And you know, evening traffic is always awful. When you quote the smooth movie, you are inadvertently turning yourself into a liar. You are setting up a broken promise.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

You really are.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

To protect your relationships and honestly your own sanity, you have to learn to quote the leaky coil version of your own life.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

I like that, the leaky coil version. It's just managing expectations by anchoring them to the outside view, not to a fantasy.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Right, because when Dave quotes the real history and it turns out to be a three-hour fix, the customer handles the news perfectly well.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

The distress vanishes because the gap between expectation and reality has been closed.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

The gap is where the pain lives. Close the gap, remove the pain. So bringing this all together, the core insight here is recognizing that your brain is fundamentally designed to hand you a clean, optimistic, incredibly naive movie of how the future is gonna go.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

It will always leave the trouble out.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Always. And you cannot stop the movie from playing, but you absolutely must stop trusting it.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

You have to actively choose to consult your real history. Even when it feels pessimistic, even when the smooth movie looks so inviting.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Plan from real history. Tell people the truth about time before the clock makes a liar out of you. Because, as Dave so perfectly puts it at the end of his reflection, the clock has never once cared what I predicted.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

It is such a good quote. The clock is utterly indifferent to our inside view.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Utterly indifferent.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

And while it is vital to apply this to our own afternoons and our own relationships, zooming out reveals a much larger and honestly slightly terrifying implication.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Really? How so?

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Well, we've just explored how the smooth movie illusion ruins individual errands, creates stress in marriages, and complicates local service calls. But we really have to consider what happens when this exact same cognitive flaw scales up.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Oh, you mean when it's not just one person trying to run to the hardware store but an entire organization?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Exactly. Think about a city government planning a new subway line.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Oh boy. Yeah. Or a nation attempting to restructure its healthcare system, or global initiatives trying to transition entire power grids. These are massive projects driven by human brains.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

And as the behavioral science proves, the human brain fundamentally refuses to budget time and resources for the unimaginable.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

We cannot picture the surprises in advance, so we just leave them out of the budget.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

So if we are cognitively incapable of adding a buffer for the things we can't foresee, how vulnerable are our biggest society level endeavors? Are our massive infrastructure projects, our governments and our global plans, essentially just multi billion dollar versions of that guy in the driveway, confidently predicting a 20 minute fix for a three hour problem?

SPEAKER_01 17:08

I think that's the multi billion dollar question, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

It really is. Something to think about the next time you promise it will only be five minutes.