The Furnace Repair She Remembered Wrong On Purpose

A woman called me a year after a job to thank me for a furnace repair I barely remembered. It had been a long one. Her furnace quit on the coldest week of the winter, and I was at her house most of the day, pulling the blower, driving back to the shop for a part, coming back. By any honest accounting it was a hard, drawn-out afternoon.

But that is not how she remembered it. She told me it was the best service experience she had ever had, and the thing she kept coming back to was the very end, when I sat down at her kitchen table, drew her a little diagram of what had failed, and told her the furnace had a good ten years left.

There is a name for what she did to that memory. In the early 1990s, Daniel Kahneman, Donald Redelmeier, and Barbara Fredrickson found that people do not remember an experience by averaging all its minutes. They remember it by two moments, the most intense one and the last one. The long middle barely counts. Kahneman called that duration neglect.

The low point of her day was in the middle, when I told her I had to drive back to the shop. If you had stopped her right then, she would have called it a disaster. But the day did not end there. It ended with me unhurried at her table, no pressure, telling her the news was good. The end is what the memory kept.

I did not know the science back then. I sat down because forty-seven years has taught me that the last few minutes of a call are the minutes the customer keeps. I watch young techs do beautiful work for three hours and then pack up in a rush while the customer is still standing there with a question on her face. They get it backwards. The end of a call is not cleanup. It is the part that writes the memory.

So on a hard call, when the day has been long and I am worn down too, I have learned not to limp across the finish line. I finish on purpose. Calm voice, clear explanation, a real goodbye. That woman did not remember her furnace day wrong. She remembered it the way memory actually works. She kept the end, and the end was good.

Core line: "The middle of the job is mine. The end of the job is theirs."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to today's deep dive. It is uh Sunday, 2026, 0719. And for this one, I actually want you to imagine it's the absolute coldest day of the year.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Oh, yeah. Just like completely freezing.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Right, bone chilling. You're in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and uh your furnace is dead, like totally broken.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Which is pretty much a nightmare scenario.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Exactly. Yeah. So the HVAC technician who comes out, he has to pull the blower motor, realizes he's missing a part, and then drives all the way back to a shop in the freezing cold.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Yeah. And then he finally returns to put it all back together. The whole thing takes six grueling freezing hours.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

No, it's just objectively a miserable day.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Highly inconvenient, miserable day. But here's the catch. A full year later, you call that exact same technician to schedule a tune-up and you tell him, quote, that was the absolute best customer service experience of your life. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

I mean, that sounds completely irrational on the surface. Because, you know, we tend to assume human memory works like a ledger, right? Like you mathematically add up all the good minutes, subtract the bad minutes, and arrive at a final score.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Right. A net positive or net negative.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Exactly. But that scenario fundamentally breaks the ledger.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

It totally shatters it. And uh that is our mission for today's deep dive. We're taking a look at this bizarre quirk of human psychology, and we're looking at it through the lens of this masterclass in customer service from a guy named Dave Hartzall.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Yeah, Dave Hartzall.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Right. He's an HVAC technician with 47 years of experience. He's the guy who took that six-hour disaster of a repair call and somehow like engineered it into a five-star memory. Okay, let's unpack this because how does an objectively terrible day turn into this glowing memory a year later?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Well, to solve the mystery of this woman's memory, we actually have to completely ignore the broken furnace.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Wait, ignore the furnace.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Yeah, we have to throw out the entire middle of the day. The freezing house, the delays, you know, driving back and forth. The whole explanation lives exclusively in the final five minutes of Dave's visit.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

So, like sometime around hour four, when the job stalled out, that would have been the absolute low point.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Oh, for sure. If you asked the customer in that exact moment, she would have rated the experience as zero.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Right. But Dave didn't end the interaction there because I mean, fast forward to the finish line, the heat is finally back on. Dave is exhausted, he's dirty, he's probably freezing himself.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Right. His instinct is probably just to leave.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah. But instead of grabbing his tool bag and bolting for the door, he stops. He sits down at her kitchen table completely unhurried.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Which is key. Unhurried.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Right. He pulls out a piece of paper, he draws this simple little diagram showing exactly what part of the furnace failed. And he talks to her in this slow, calm voice. No pressure to upsell her on anything.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Just explaining the situation.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Exactly. And he finishes by delivering the good news that the unit actually has a solid ten years of life left in it.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

And that that kitchen table conversation overwrote the entire afternoon. I mean, the woman didn't remember the day wrong.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

She didn't.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

No, she remembered it exactly the way the human brain is biologically hardwired to file memories. The hours of inconvenience essentially just vanished, you know, compressed down to just a couple of moments.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Okay, so it's just like it's just like going to a five-star restaurant, right? You have this amazing five-course meal, it's perfect. But at the very end, the waiter spills a carafe of boiling hot coffee directly into your lap.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Oh man. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

The whole dinner feels ruined, right? Like you only talk about the third-degree burns. Are we just looking at the exact reverse of that coffee spill?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

That is a phenomenal way to frame it. Yes. The coffee spill completely hijacks the memory of the scallops, just like Dave's diagram at the kitchen table hijacked the memory of the freezing house. Okay, wow. And um, your restaurant analogy is perfectly aligned with this Nobel Prize-winning scientific concept. In the early 90s, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Donald Rettelmeier, and Barbara Frederickson discovered what we now call the peak end rule. Right. Their research proof that the human brain does not mathematically average an experience. We really only remember two things. The peak, which is the most intense moment, good or bad.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

So in this case, the frustrating middle when the furnace repair stalled out.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Exactly. The peak and the end. How the experience resolves in its final moments, everything else just gets discarded.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Okay. I have to bring up this landmark study from 1996 because Kahneman and Radlmeyer tested this with uh medical procedures.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Oh, the colonoscopy study.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Yes. And keep in mind, right, mid-90s, this was a highly uncomfortable procedure, usually done while the patient was fully awake.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Unpleasant to say the least.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Very. And the researchers had patients reporting their pain levels minute by minute on a dial. So they found something deeply, deeply counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

What's fascinating here is that they had two groups, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah, two groups. Group A had a standard shorter procedure, but it ended abruptly, right at the most painful moment. Oh. Yeah. And group B had a much longer procedure. Objectively, they endured significantly more pain over a longer period of time. But for group B, the doctors deliberately left the scope in place for a few extra minutes without moving it.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

So it was still uncomfortable, but it created a a gentler tapering off at the end.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Exactly. And when they followed up, the patients in group B, the ones who were on the table longer and suffered more total pain, they remembered the entire procedure is significantly better than group A.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Which is just wild.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

It is. Kahneman called it duration neglect.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Right, duration neglect. Because more total pain and more total time actually resulted in a better memory simply because of how it ended. The length of the frustrating middle barely even registers in our memory banks.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

So the brain basically just drops the stopwatch entirely.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

It completely ignores the stopwatch. And you know, we really have to look at why, because this isn't just some weird quirk. It's a biological survival mechanism.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Like from an evolutionary standpoint.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Yeah, exactly. Think about the human brain on the ancient savannah. It consumes a massive amount of calories. It literally cannot afford the metabolic cost or like the hard drive space to store a 10-hour day in high definition.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Right, like trying to save a 4K video of every single day.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Your system would crash so it aggressively compresses the file. You don't need to remember the four hours you walk through the tall grass. You only need to remember the peak threat, like when the lion jumped out in the end, the fact that you successfully climbed a tree and survived, threat level and survival outcome.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Oh wow. So the peak end rule is just our modern biological compression software.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Exactly. Which perfectly explains why the woman with the broken furnace experienced duration neglect. The brain grabbed the six-hour ordeal, extracted the freezing low point and that reassuring kitchen table ending, and just hit delete on the rest of the file to save energy.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

But I mean, since our brains are wired to prioritize endings like this, we have to look at how people in the real world handle this. Because you either master this instinctively, like Dave, or you get it completely tragically backwards.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Which happens a lot in the trades, actually.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah. Dave notes that young HVAC techs, they'll often do excellent, beautiful technical work for three straight hours.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Right. They take real pride in it.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

They do. They have perfectly clean solder joints, everything is mechanically flawless, but they treat the end of the call like it's just cleanup.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Which is the fatal flaw. I mean, their bodies are tired, they want to leave, they've been sweating in an attic or freezing in a basement.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

So they just pack up their tools in a rush, mumble something about the invoice being emailed, and they just bolt.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah, while the customer is still standing in the doorway with an unasked question.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Right. But but wait, let me push back on this for a second. Yes. Because what does this all mean? Are we saying you can just do a terrible job, cut corners on the repair, but slap a smile on at the end and basically psychologically manipulate people into thinking you're a master technician?

SPEAKER_00 7:53

I'm really glad you brought that up because no, absolutely not. It is not manipulation.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

The physical work has to be real and it has to be necessary. I mean, if Dave sits at the kitchen table and draws a beautiful diagram, but then the customer wakes up at 2.m and they're freezing because the furnace broke again. Well, the ending changes.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Oh, right. The new end of that experience is waking up freezing in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Exactly. You cannot fake the repair. But if you rush the ending, the customer isn't going to remember your clean solder joints because they don't even know what those are.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Right. They don't have the technical expertise to care about the solder joints.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Right. They will just remember feeling like a bother. They remember feeling rushed. Dave's core rule is honestly brilliant. He says, quote, the middle of the job is mine. The end of the job is theirs.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

The middle of the job is mine. The end of the job is theirs.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

That is so good. It is. You have to deliberately slow down right when every instinct in your body tells you to speed up and go home. You show them the old part, you answer their questions, and you leave them with a calm, finished feeling.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Aaron Powell So that the memory actually matches the hard work you put in.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Exactly. You're protecting the integrity of your own work.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Aaron Powell Which is incredible. But you know, the more you think about Dave's rule about furnace repairs, it's not really just about customer service.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

It's the exact same mechanism we use to judge our entire lives. The deep dive really zooms out here because Dave realizes the peak end rule applies to literally everything.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

If we connect this to the bigger picture, it really dictates how we evaluate basically all of our experiences.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Right. Like think about how people remember a marriage. They don't mathematically average out 20 years of mundane Tuesday mornings.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Right. They remember the absolute best stretch or the absolute worst stretch and how it ended.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Yeah. Or a career. You remember your highest achievement, your peak, and the day you packed up your desk and walked out the door.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Aaron Powell We even do this with people. Like you remember a parent by a few really vivid moments from childhood and then their final years.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

It's like it's like judging a 500-page book entirely by a single plot twist in the middle, and then the final paragraph on the last page.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

That's a great analogy.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

You literally throw away 400 pages of careful character building and dialogue, but the ending is the only part you actually quote to your friends.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Which highlights this really profound tension between fairness and fact. I mean, it is incredibly unfair that the long, ordinary, quiet middle days.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Which make up the vast majority of our lives, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Right. Those days actually make up the bulk of our existence, but they just mostly dissolve.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

They just vanish.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah. But you know, there's no use fighting how the mind files things. It's biological.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

So you can't argue with the algorithm, you just have to learn how to code for it.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Precisely. You have to accept that the ending carries the weight, so you give it the deliberate attention it demands.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

You know, that's exactly the takeaway here. Because Dave Hartzell, he didn't need to read Conham's scientific papers to understand human nature. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

No, 47 years in the trade taught him everything he needed to know.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah, he learned to stop limping across the finish line. He finishes on purpose. Calm voice, clear explanation, a real goodbye.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

It's a deliberate act of translating reality into a positive memory.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Exactly. So for you listening, we want to challenge you to examine your own endings this week.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Yeah, think about your own transitions.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Right, whether you're wrapping up a project at work or uh saying goodbye to a friend after a long trip or just finishing a really tough conversation. Are you treating that ending as a hurried cleanup?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Are you rushing out the door just because you're tired?

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Yeah. Or are you giving it the deliberate, unhurried attention it deserves, knowing it's basically the only part their brain is actually going to keep.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

It really forces you to reevaluate how you close things out.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

It does. And uh I want to leave you with one final kind of provocative thought to pull on. Because if our memories of our own lives are genuinely just a highlight reel of peaks and endings, it begs a really strange question.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Are we actually living for the experience itself in the present moment? Or are we secretly just curating the final memories that our future selves will have to look back on?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Wow. Yeah, that's a lot to chew on.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Think about that the next time you find yourself stuck in a frustrating, long, ordinary middle. Just remember the cold reality of a freezing afternoon and, well, the lasting warmth of a quiet kitchen table.