Preconceived Notions

I typically get a certain picture in my head of a person or place I haven’t seen before. For example, as I waited for the Sears repairman last week, I expected him to be small, wiry with a friendly but uncommitted demeanor — in other words, a nicer and slightly more useful incarnation of the lousy repairman who six months earlier refused to open my dishwasher to check why it had quit drying my plates. “Run the machine with vinegar every month or so, and use the Jet Dry! That’s what really washes your dishes,” he said. I even told the guy point-blank that he was patronizing me, but that failed to rouse him into doing his job.

I finally gave up — you can only wrangle with someone for so long before you say, Oh, fuck it, it’s still under warranty.

Having had such crappy luck with Sears repair these last few years, I wasn’t convinced the repairman doing my yearly maintenance (an option I was unaware of until this final year of my five-year extended warranty) would be a senior technician as I had requested. After all, the guy was supposed to arrive between 8 am and noon, and it was now 1:30. When he called to say he was leaving Beverly Hills and would be at my house in 15 minutes, his voice, a tenor, caused me to revise my picture a little. The guy was in his 30s tops and had a full head of black hair.

The senior technician (he really was a senior technician) did have a full head of black hair, but it was tinged with gray. He was big enough to have played football and had a round face. He’d been a technician for almost 30 years and admitted that he had been one click away from buying an unlocked Nokia 95 smartphone the night before.

He took apart the lower spray arm to find bits of plastic wrapper and black schmutz clogging the filter. He cleaned the filter, fixed the latch, checked the wiring, and even checked the water temperature (ideally the water should be at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and mine was only 120). He also told me it’s better to ask for a 1-5 pm appointment rather than the morning one because technicians are usually overbooked, and they’re required to take and log their 15-minute breaks and one-hour lunches.

In other words, he was an excellent technician, a kind man, and looked nothing like my mental picture of him.

But normally, people, places, what have you, rarely end up the way I imagine them to look or seem. The few times they have, I’ve really been surprised.

But then are there many people who guess correctly more often than not? To what extent do past memories color future recollections?

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memory token, preconceived notion, Sears repair, dishwasher

Tags: dishwasher, memory token, notion, Sears