I Guess I Do Not Understand People And/Or Their Decisions.......

Since this thread has gone sideways, I’ll throw my peeve in here:
I’m perfectly happy to pay for skill, and time. Do not tell me that the repair is $25 + parts, and then charge me 10x the Amazon price for the EXACT part. Now I don’t trust you, and will never do business with you again. If you had said $100, plus parts, and charged me, say, 0-50% more than Amazon, we’d still be friends. The dollar amount isn’t the problem. The trickery is the problem. This was an AC repair. The part was a capacitor. The work took 10 minutes. The company is owned by an acquaintance.
 
It is a really deep question why people do what they do. Funny how it’s intersected with mechanics because as a wrench twister it was always baffling why somebody would pour more $$ into some car than it was worth. To me most modern cars were “consumables” because sooner or later you couldn’t get some vital electronic part or worst of all get some ghost in the machine electronic bug that couldn’t be excised. Cars were always a tool for cheap reliable transportation, so I never got the status/emotional attachment.
Emotions play more of a role in these things than one can comprehend and then no amount of rationale can be applied. I’ve been reading “Deep Survival“ about who survives and what the mental processes and how emotions and brain function all collide and cause all kinds of warping of judgement.
 
C-Bag said:
It is a really deep question why people do what they do. Funny how it’s intersected with mechanics because as a wrench twister it was always baffling why somebody would pour more $$ into some car than it was worth. To me most modern cars were “consumables” because sooner or later you couldn’t get some vital electronic part or worst of all get some ghost in the machine electronic bug that couldn’t be excised. Cars were always a tool for cheap reliable transportation, so I never got the status/emotional attachment.
Emotions play more of a role in these things than one can comprehend and then no amount of rationale can be applied. I’ve been reading “Deep Survival“ about who survives and what the mental processes and how emotions and brain function all collide and cause all kinds of warping of judgement.
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It's simple. Humans are not rational creatures. None of us is completely rational or logical, and some aren't even remotely logical. (I have in in-law like that...) Car purchases are high on the list of emotional actions for most people.
 
This book really points out how all the factors of being human and the interplay between emotions and the parts of the brain can skew and fog perceptions. All of us have gotten “I want it fever” where a machine, car, house, whatever overrides logic and we just gotta have it! When I’ve done that buyers remorse has always followed. This book does a good job of explaining the mechanism of how certain decisions to do stuff that we wouldn’t do normally gets overridden. All through the context of accidents by talking to the survivors and experts.

There are tons of different stories but can you imagine being a 17yrd girl in ‘60 being on a flight and lightening strikes the plane and it breaks up and she falls into the Amazon? She walks out 11 days and survives.

It has always been way too complicated for me because I didn’t have all the info I guess. When it comes to tools I’m way more impulsive than I’d like to believe. I wonder if the guy with files the OP mentioned just absolutely could not part with the old files. It is true they don’t make anything like they used to.
 
Back when I was in college, I worked a summer job at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. Most of our customers were people going to and from their summer vacation. we were a full service station in those days and in addition to filling the tank, would clean the windows and check the oil and radiator.

The manager of the the station had a radiator pressure tester and would pump it up and sadly inform the customer that they needed a new radiator cap and if they didn't buy on then and there, they were likely to have a catastrophic failure in some remote location, requiring an expensive tow. He had more radiator caps in store then the NAPA dealer.

Another mechanic in town had the nickname of Ball Joint Charley. He had a sturdy iron bar that he would insert into the suspension and pry with it. He would show the customer how much play there was and convince them that they were driving a death trap and it would be criminal to leave without replacing the ball joints.
 
Its not just the so called trades either.
We had a surgeon who was known as the butcher. Everyone knew it, all the other doctors knew it but nothing was admitted until he retired whereupon the so called "Profession" gave a little cheer.
 
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