fiction in the journal

[Bill Ballard]

On 8/30/96, JIMRPT@aol.com rote:
<<A little fiction, addressed in a constructive manner,
is certainly acceptable and I bet that it would receive a wider readership
than most of the highly technical tuning articles. >>

You'd be surprised what people could learn from fiction. Back in the 2/90
"Granite Action" (NHChapter), there was a report of an Dept. of Labor
sponsored study to determine the value of your work (or more precisely,
your labor rate as piano technician). Please try to imagine the actual
formula writ large using a symbol font, as you might see it in a college
statistics textbook.

*Demurals*

Have you ever wondered why nobody  seems to care how good your best
work really is, and why the local cultural elite refuses to acknowledge
that you can service circles around the neighborhood Prima Tuna? Well,
econometrists working under a U.S. Dept of Labor contract  at a Major
University have uncovered the formula which scientifically calculates the
market value of our skills. In the fact this formula is so simple that it
can even be run without plugging in any real numbers.

P=((S*Q)+n)*o
where:
P= the overall perception of your skills be an individual customer
S= the real concrete assessment of you skills by the one who knows them
best , you! (Of course.) On a scale of 1-10
Q= the quality of that customer's piano expressed by its percentile
rating among all the area's pianos. (You'll be sweating far fewer bullets
making a 99%ile piano sound good, than a 58%ile woofer. And if the
customer doesn't have an ear for the 99%ile sound, he or she certainly
has a nose for sweat.
And here's the real kicker........
n= the JeNeSais Quotient, the extent to which your customer perceives
your work as having been achieved by a certain magical
"je-ne-sais-quois". Undoubtedly the most difficult of these factors to
quantify, it can be roughly gauged by the frequency of "milk and cookies"
percs and blank check transactions. Rated on a scale of 1-100.
"o", by the way is the import expert factor. If you're in the local
Yellow Pages, o=1. If you're from out of town, o=2.

As you can see it's the irrational JeNeSais Quotient which makes the
scale such a slippery slope, up or down, depending on which way the wind
is  blowing. And you can use this to set fee increases, commissions, and
merchandise markups. But as sure as Death or Taxes, if you slip up you'll
start slipping down.



Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter

"There are fifty ways to screw up on this job. If you can think of twenty
of them, you're a genius......and you aint no genius"
Mickey Rourke to William Hurt, in "Body Heat", discussing arson.