Recent experience: called a HVAC contractor to fix a heating furnace, they spent 1 hour convincing us to scrap the current furnace and install a new one; once we told him "no" at least 10 times, he spent 30 minutes "diagnosing" the problem while on the phone with somebody with technical knowledge; then he quoted $250 to replace a part that I could buy on Ebay for $15. Finally, I bought the part and replaced it myself.

▲

dml2135 4 days ago | parent [-]

I understand being annoyed at a sales pitch, but this sounds like about 3-4 hours of work for the contractor, which comes out to about $80/hour. That doesn’t sound so unreasonable to me.

	▲	skirmish 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sorry, I skipped some details. They had a pre-agreed $180 "diagnostics fee", which we paid, then they tried to charge $250 on top of that for the part. The contractor had no technical knowledge and kept video-conferencing the office for help. He had lots of sales training, though.
	▲	Der_Einzige 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even trying to sympathize with the contractor is ontologically evil.