On Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 10:51 AM, Scott & Jason Jackson wrote: > This has reminded me of visiting a lady many years ago ... Wow, this is bringing back "old war stories" of difficult customers. Compared to Terry's nice old lady, much greater stress. The one I'm remembering had a K&C spinet, terribly flat & out of tune, which I brought up to pitch. The lady spent most of the time hovering around, drinking heavily and smoking like a chimney (and a TV blaring in the background). I *tried* to explain A440 etc but didn't seem to make much of an impression. She seemed pleased with the results but called back in a couple months informing me that her nephew had played the piano the previous day and he informed her that I had *ruined* the piano by my tuning. She was ranting about over the phone so intensely that attempts to explain about pitch raises etc were going no place fast & she was so out of control that I wasn't about to go to her home to explain/custom detune it to her nephew's specs etc. Whew! Goodbye! Deleted her from my customer database!! So, fifteen years later I get a call for a tuning. I go out, a pleasant lady directs me to a very flat, very out of tune console, I explain about pitch raising, and proceed to get to work. Somewhere along the line she mentions that I had tuned a different piano for her long ago, so she remembered to call me when she got another piano. I gradually started recalling that I had been to this address before, and she did look a bit familiar. Uh-oh, I thought. But she was very pleasant, and no alcohol or tobacco was obvious. I think maybe the revolution in psycho-pharmacology had something to do with the improvement in the situation. Patrick Draine
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