shake, rattle & roll

[Ron Nossaman]

At 04:15 PM 6/10/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Why is it that while tuning a piano ,all is calm & quite untill you start
>tuning the treble section? Then vaccums start ,dishes are being washed,
>dogs start to howl, washers & dryers are started & kids start scrapping.
>Its hard enough to hear in this section when its quite. Does anyone else
>have this problem, or am I the only lucky one this happens to.
>I don't want to get real fussy with my customers & lose their business.I
>would appreciate any ideas that some of you out there have& how do you
>handle these kind of situations.
>
>Thanks for reading my grips,
>
>Dick Powell


Sorry Dick, it must just be you. All of my customers immediately leave the
house and sit out in the yard in the rain to get away from MY noise. <G>

Really, I've found people to be pretty accommodating when I explain real
nice-like that they are not only competing with me, they're winning. It just
doesn't seem to dawn on people that a tuner needs to hear what he's doing.
They want to make sure you have enough light, and help you pull the piano
out into the middle of the room. I never have figured that one out. BTW, I
don't think it's the noise, per se, they feel the need to make. For some
reason people almost universally feel the need to CLEAN something when any
kind of service person is in their house. I think it's some kind of
territorial nesting thing. Who knows? My all time favorite is the faces
people make washing windows. Very much like when they feed a baby, it's a
hoot. Ah well, at least they didn't have the exterminater come in and poison
you while you were tuning. That tends to put an edge on your day.

 Ron