Bargaining for Services

I lived in China from 2004 to 2006. In that part of the world, many products are bought and sold on the street. Prices are rarely fixed. If you see something you want to buy, you have to ask how much it is. The seller gives you a quick once-over, tries to predict how much they can get out of you, and names a price. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was often paying well above market price for pretty much everything I was buying, from tangerines to computer speakers. I needed to learn how to bargain.

I got really good at it. It became something like a sport to me. My Chinese friends were often impressed and would tell me that I, a foreigner, was arriving at prices that were lower than they would have paid. I loved hearing that. Sometimes when I needed something – a pair of gloves, perhaps – I’d hear the initial price and set my mind on a much lower number, usually about forty percent of the first thing they said. Usually I’d get the item but sometimes I’d walk away frustrated that I’d lost the game. And then I’d kick myself for not having accepted the vendor’s perfectly acceptable lowest offer, since my hands were numb from the cold and I really would have been willing to pay that amount to keep them warm. When I first began bargaining, it was merely because I felt foolish when I got swindled. As my skills progressed, I really just wanted to win.

Now I’m running my own business and in the early stages of it I have a lot of slow days. I jump at any opportunity to work and build my reputation in the community. I try to keep my prices very competitive. My pricing is based on an unusual formula. Most locksmiths set their price points with profit maximization in mind. I’ve aimed at achieving a middle-class salary through a 55-hour work week, and calculated my prices accordingly. Even though it would be hard to find a licensed locksmith willing to work for less than I do, people still try to bargain me down. Sometimes it’s because they genuinely can’t afford the unanticipated expense of hiring a locksmith. Other times my customers bargain with me for sport, just for the good feeling that comes from winning a battle of wills against another human, and the bragging rights that accompany that.

It makes me think back to my time in Nanjing, when I would work hard to get a vendor at the night market, shoulders slumped, to slash five more yuan from the price of a good. That five yuan, which I wouldn’t have picked up if I’d dropped on the street, might have been the better part of the vendor’s profit margin for that item. I’d walk back to my nice apartment, feeling victorious. The vendor would probably quietly curse me as she wrapped up her wares in a tarp and head home to rest up for the next long day of work on the horizon. I sometimes wish now that I had not exploited their poverty to get my jollies.

But I shouldn’t forget that it wasn’t the desire to win that started this off; it was the fear of being suckered. Unless you’re very familiar with a market, it’s hard to know what a fair price is. All you can do is hope and trust that you’re paying the right amount for a good product. Nobody knows what a locksmith is supposed to charge. Heck, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to charge. I’d like to earn a living wage and I’d hate for my customers to feel after the fact that I had gotten one over on them. In our culture, most people aren’t comfortable probing for wiggle room on prices, so it’s my responsibility to set a fair price from the start. For those that are prone to bargaining, all I can say is that the price is the price, and I’ve done my best to make it fair.

Work Hands

I was out installing a deadbolt today when I reached into my front shirt pocket and was startled by a sharp pain in my finger. At first I wondered if I’d been stung by a hornet. I drew my hand out to figure out what had happened. The culprit was no hornet, though; some idiot had left a fresh razor blade in that pocket.

I surveyed the tip of my right index finger. I had sliced it rather badly but it wasn’t bleeding yet. I was reminded of something familiar but I couldn’t quite find the thought. My mind groped for it and then, ah!, there it was–that moment of reflection that a toddler experiences right after he hurts himself and right before he releases a torrent of shrieks. My finger was reflecting. And, sure enough, in the next moment the blood started to come. I did what any normal adult man would: I stuck the greasy dirty bleeding fingertip into my mouth.

This was all a little embarrassing because I’d been having a conversation with my customer before it started, and the cut completely pulled my focus away. When I looked up she was saying something about a first-aid kit and scurrying out of the kitchen. She came back just seconds later, Band-Aid in hand. She asked if I needed her to put it on for me. What followed was a slight pause and then a chuckle from both of us. She had just gotten home with her three kids and was in full-on mother mode, making snacks and helping with homework. I bandaged my own wound.

My biggest concern at the moment the blood appeared was not the pain. The pain became irrelevant as soon as I saw the first red droplet. This is always the case when I begin to bleed at work. The focus immediately shifts from my discomfort to stain avoidance. I don’t want to mark up people’s white doors and freshly painted walls. I also make some efforts to hide the blood from any customers that may be around. People tend not to enjoy seeing their skilled tradesmen bleed. Plus, my injury is evidence of a mistake — a moment of clumsiness or, as in this case, poor judgment.

When I worked in an office I’d occasionally get what I liked to call white-collar war wounds: a deep papercut; a pinched pinky from changing the jug in the water cooler; a burn on the wrist while ironing my shirt in the morning. None of that could even compare to the nonstop abuse that my hands receive from working with tools on a daily basis. On any given day I have one wound fresh, one healing, and several in various stages of fading.

This is not to speak of the dirt. Lock work is dirty. The internal workings are greased up in production and that grease spends years attracting and accumulating dirt until I expose it and it can work its way into the cracks of my hands. The dirtier my hands get, the more I want to wash them. And the more I wash my hands, the more I dry them out, thus deepening the crevices into which the the dirt can work itself. This is a large part of why I don’t like doing automotive work. Working on cars is a filthy process; sometimes it seems I only have to look at a car door lock to cover my hands in gray soot.

But I can tolerate the injuries. I’m not concerned that my hands have become an abstract timeline of my many little mistakes. The scars are clear evidence of work, and there’s no shame in work.

Hollywood Locks

There’s this program on Showtime that makes my life difficult. It’s called “Dexter”. Up until now it only aired on a premium channel, which has mitigated the amount of trouble it could cause me. However, it recently broadcast its final episode and I imagine it will soon start to run in syndication on TBS. Then my life will be very difficult.

For those of you who haven’t seen the program, the titular character is a serial killer. But don’t worry. He’s a good serial killer. He has a code. He only kills bad people. He often has to break into their homes to search their computers and basements for evidence that they are bad enough for him to serial kill. For getting into their homes, he has a set of lock picks. The program frequently depicts him approaching the front door of his would-be victim’s house in broad sunny Miami daylight, picks in hand. This would be incredibly audacious if he didn’t live in TV Land. In TV Land, lock picks are exactly like keys, in that they function just as quickly and easily as keys, and they are guaranteed to work seamlessly every time. That’s why just as soon as the picks appear, Dexter can be seen breezing into the house.

In reality, picking a lock is not just a matter of having the tools to do it. With many locks, it can be a delicate and painstaking process that requires intense focus and quite a bit of time, something akin to threading a needle in the dark. I’ve picked many hundreds of locks, yet every time I pull my picks from my front pocket to open a door, my heart rate rises a little. I get nervous. There’s no way of knowing how long it will take me to open the lock with my picks, or whether it’s even within my capacity to do so. Never am I more nervous than when someone is hovering behind me watching, impatiently expecting the door to swing open. Nervousness can compel a lot of people to pick a lot of things: scabs, noses, sometimes even arguments. But I can assure you, dear reader, that it does not make me a more proficient picker of locks. It has just the opposite effect.

It isn’t the customers’ fault that they believe their locks should be picked in a matter of seconds. That’s what every televised depiction of lock picking they’ve ever seen has led them to reasonably expect. And I can’t exactly blame the makers of Dexter for devoting too little airtime to Dexter’s lockpicking efforts. Showing a man crouch uncomfortably in front of a door for anything more than three seconds would make for very boring television. And it’s not my fault that I don’t get to perform my job in TV Land. Nobody did anything wrong here. Still, I think my life would be better in a world without Dexter, and I hope TBS doesn’t pick up the show.

Old Ways

Back in the days when I was learning this trade in Mexico, the maestro in the shop would teach me how to hand-fabricate parts to broken locks. Knowing that I would someday be practicing my trade in the States, I would arrogantly say that I didn’t need to know how to do these things. “In my country, we would throw it out and buy a new one!”

So yesterday I felt a twinge of shame when a customer brought me a baggie full of loose metal pieces that were once the lock to his antique curio. What was I going to do — throw out his lock and tell him to go to Ethan Allen for a new china cabinet? I had to fix it, and thanks to the maestro I knew exactly how to reassemble the lock and replicate the lost springs with pieces of special scrap metal I’d been holding onto. When I was done, the lock was as good as new. The job left me feeling happily nostalgic and I had to write a note of thanks to the maestro.

Film Review: The Locksmith (2010)

I’m no film critic, so I’ll start by reviewing not the movie, but the work of Mike, the fictional locksmith portrayed therein.

Another thing that I’m not is a felon. In reality, Mike’s character would have a hard time getting bonded and licensed as a locksmith in Washington State. I wonder if there’s a single state that allows people on parole to work in this trade.

So it’s not surprising that both his work and his demeanor leave something to be desired. Early in the film he opens a door without confirming that it belongs to the woman requesting the service, and it turns out that it does not. That’s foolish and unprofessional. This is typical poor decision-making from a man with a proven record of making terrible life choices. It also happens to be one of my recurring nightmares. When I’m not dreaming that I forgot to turn in the final paper for a core high school credit and that my diploma is being revoked, I’m dreaming that I’ve just let a burglar into a house that is not his. When I’m awake, I always remember to ask for identification.

But what bothers me more about Mike the locksmith is that he demonstrates not an ounce of sympathy for his customers. It’s always a bad day when you have to call a locksmith. The least the locksmith could do is be friendly. In one scene, Mike looks at a simple cylinder that an average locksmith could easily open with a pick, and immediately says that it needs to be drilled. He doesn’t even make an attempt to save the customer money by opening the lock in a nondestructive fashion. The customer protests, but he reaches for his drill as if she doesn’t have a choice. This is a lazy and wasteful way of doing business. To his credit, his pricing seems pretty reasonable.

Locksmith rating: 3/10

The film itself is maddening to watch. Time and again, when faced with the simplest of choices, Mike chooses the one that is most obviously wrong. I can imagine that his parade of increasingly dumb decisions would be fun to watch if it were broken up with some comic relief, but there’s nothing funny about this movie. And as a locksmith, watching the movie made me terribly anxious. Mike spends his entire workday gallivanting around with a crazy lady, entrusting his service vehicle and equipment to her, and ignoring service calls. Throughout the entire movie, I just wanted him to get back to work. What’s worse is that he repeatedly places himself into awkward (but not amusing) social situations, all to humor this marginally attractive kook who has taken an interest in him. I would call the movie relentlessly uncomfortable if it weren’t for the very boring stretches.

Film rating: 5/10