Tuners Nightmares. My top 10

[sussexpianos]

After reading some notes from the forum, I would like to present my top 10 nightmares for a tuner/technician and welcome others to post theirs.
1) Finding the piano to tune is an old Eavestaff with the tuning pins underneath the keyboard. Deep heat for my back!
2) Being in a rush and breaking a steel string in the middle. Its like an operation with a tourch in your mouth!
3)Loosing your paps wedge in a drop action piano. Long nose pliers are in the car parked miles away due to parking problems.
4) Finding the screws holding the action parts to the action rail have rusted and touching them with a screwdriver results in them breaking off.
5) An anoying buzzing sound which seems to come from here, there, no there, dam, need longer arms!
6) Tuning a piano with Neighbours at full volume on the TV next to you, mum turns it down, child turns it up. Little darling!
7)A nursing home. Your tuning the piano which has been cooking in high temperatures since it arrive. The residents have surrounded you in their chairs and are very vocal about the loud noise you are making!
Mental institutes where you are escourted everywhere and locked in for your own protection. I do some of my fastest ever tunings there.
9)Oblong pins. Need I say more? Even square pins are better.
10)This is a personel one, spiders, I hate them. One time, this big black one poped up as i was tuning, I poped out of the house as if it was burning down. Once, as the customer also did not like them, had to tune it another day so she could get her husband to remove it, well, its was very big!!

[Gill the Piano]

Mine are;
1) Pianos buried under twelve feet of music, books, pictures, vases, lace doilies (what IS the point??), recorders, ivories that the brats have picked off,mixed assorted small toys composed of three thousand separate very very small pieces. And a lamp whose cord is so short it has to stay on the piano and gets in your way as you tune (with the added bonus of a sympathetic buzz now and then).
2) Brats who make a racket ON PURPOSE. (Revenge can be obtained when the mummy asks for a piano teacher recommendation and the local ferocious knuckle-rapper can be given a glowing reference).
3) Bad tea/coffee. I now drink everything black with no sugar, largely out of self defence.
4) Customers who - often quite unwittingly - sing or whistle the note you're trying to tune. Bless 'em!
5) American pianos.
6) Customers who know nothing about pianos but think otherwise. e.g. "This piano has a real brass frame, you know"..."I always clean the notes with milk as recommended by the butler to the Duchess of Flannelbelly", etc., etc..Bless 'em!
7) Elusive squeaks/buzzes/rattles (see Sussex' list above).
Dropping a papp's wedge...into a pianola. Aaaaaaaargh!
9) Pianolas...but my osteopath has a Mercedes, and I think pianolas bought at least two wheels of it.
10)Eavestaff mini drop action tuning pins under the keyboard. See last bit re osteopath...and the other 2 wheels of the merc.

[PianoGuy]

All of the above. Plus:

Retired mechanical engineers who tell me that there must be a more efficient method of tuning a piano than a steel pin wedged into a block of wood. Ditto with soundboards, actions, bridges and the little metal things which hold the pages open.

American pianos yes Gill, but especially the 'spinets' from the '50s onwards, no matter whether it's a Kimball, Whitney, Willis, Grand, Wurtilizer, Bladwin Acrobatic, whether or not it has the benefit of a Mezzo-Thermoneal Stabilization Process, Patented Synchro-Tone strings, Exclusive Full Blow Action; it's all meaningless tripe, and Steinway should be ashamed of themselves for making them too. They're not much better.

Polish pianos.

East German pianos.

Russian pianos.

I could go on..... And often do......

[Barrie Heaton]

Most of the above plus


1. Piano Teachers who put money on top of the piano and call you because of the rattle
2. American spinets and even worse UK ones made for the US market that stayed here Ajelo comes to mind
3. School Teachers who inform you that you will not disturb the class of kids doing gym in the hall were you are tuning
4. Spring and loops
5. Ebay pianos condemned yet one more today
6. Parents’ who tell you our whatever will let you in and the whatever is about 7 year old.
7. Yamaha Factory worker who uses them compressed air screwdriver to do up the screws on the practise pedal rail please go back to the wing nut


Barrei,

[sussexpianos]

LOL these have made me chuckle this morning
we could all write a book, what should we call it?
"How to anoy a tuner?"

Gill, I like the comment about tea & coffee. Its a real treat when the customer brings out a filtered coffee with expensive looking sugar lumps (not square but funny looking) and some expensive cookies! Who needs a Wild bean cafe!!
And then theres the cheap nasty coffee which soon disapears into the next plant pot.
Guy, you get them as well? "where's the locking nut on those pins?" and "I could make a frame out of carbon fibre"
Barrie, Gym in the hall, which echos, with pop music so they can dance to! and then they ask "can you tune quietly?"

[Gill the Piano]

Or you say, as 300 brats thunder into the hall where you're tuning, "I'm sorry, but I'm tuning the piano in here", to be met with a cheery "O that's all right, you won't disturb us!" from the teacher ( who is usually only about twelve anyway. Am I showing my age?)
Re coffee; my old mentor, Fred, was caught lobbing a particularly noxious brew out of the window onto the flowerbed below (where he assured me it killed everything it touched). "O Mr Ellisdon, didn't you like it?" the hurt client said.
"It was delicious, my dear," he lied, fluently, "but there was a fly in it."
"I'll get you another one, then..."

[Bill Kibby]

High on my list would have to be tuners who talk rubbish, and display such poor English that they let the side down for all of us. Then there's the twenty-gallon fishtank perched on the piano, a tank which will take 3 hours to empty. Plus most of the above!

[PianoGuy]

Re coffee; my old mentor, Fred, was caught lobbing a particularly noxious brew out of the window onto the flowerbed below (where he assured me it killed everything it touched). "O Mr Ellisdon, didn't you like it?" the hurt client said.

Hi Gill!

I knew a tuner called Mr.Ellisdon in my youth, but remember him as Bob Ellisdon. Am I mistaken, or did he have a piano tuner brother? Lived somewhere near Iver Heath. I think he used to drive one of those awful USSR Moskvitches which rusted away before MOT-time?

On the refreshments front, I once was given a mug of tea made from a presumably pre-war tea bag and a piece of fruit cake. Luckily I spotted that the green layer wasn't actualy icing, but a culture closely related to penicillin before I ate any of it. The nice old feller who gave it to me was proud of the fact he'd made it himself, although he neglected to tell me that he must've made it to celebrate the end of food rationing. He had a lovely old Goetze grand which took up all of his immaculate drawing room which he referred to as "The Goats".
"I'm glad you like my goats", he would say on regular intervals.
This phrase never failed to make me scan the room nervously lest one of them should give me a swift butt up the rear.

[Gill the Piano]

Fred and Bob were brothers, but Bob moved away somewhere near the seaside I think. Fred was vice president (or president of vice, as he called it) of the PTA at one point. Can't remember what he drove, but it was fairly flash and in v. good nick, so probably not a Moskowitz! Fred died late 1980's.

[Gill the Piano]

All right, an extra one for my list; poxy electric gates that you have to get out of the car and press a stupid button in the POURING rain and wait until a querulous voice asks who it is, despite the fact that it's ten o'clock on the dot and that's when you said you'd be there...no, it's Al Quaeda, actually, could you let me in? And then the gates open at a speed reminiscent of an aged retainer, so by the time you've actually got in and sat down at the piano you've wasted a good ten minutes. All because some refugee Londoner has mistaken rural Buckinghamshire for one of the seedier districts of the Bronx.
And after all that it was a $&*%*!% am*rican spinet.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All right, rant over, you can come out now...

[genaa]

at the risk of going off-topic but potentially making more of you smile in future...

i am about to get a piano for first time in about 15 years and am dearly looking forward to playing again. I will be needing the services of someone(s) very much, if not exactly like your good tuning/technician selves. Can you therefore:

a) state your preference for tea and coffee flavour/strength/vintage/DOCG etc

b) whether you are allergic to cats (even if they stay hidden most of the time anyone is within 800 yds)

c) what type and flavour biscuits/snacks you most enjoy

that way I can hopefully ensure you a warm welcome sometime very soon hehe!

Cheers for a most amusing thread!!

Genaa

[PianoGuy]

All because some refugee Londoner has mistaken rural Buckinghamshire for one of the seedier districts of the Bronx.
And after all that it was a $&*%*!% am*rican spinet.

Heck.

I think I've been there!

[Gill the Piano]

Genaa;
a) Just get what your tuner asks for; in Wimbledon week I get asked what I want (between sets), I ask for weak black tea, no sugar, thankyou.. Hours later (between sets) I get strong white coffee with about twelve sugars. And is there a pot plant when you need one...?
b) Love cats, dogs, rats, gerbils, snakes. I'd be grateful if the children could be locked up, though...
c) Anything. We can't afford to be wheat/milk/soya/tripolyethylmicrocellulose intolerant in our job. Personally, I have only ever been defeated by an Iranian biscuit which I couldn't get my teeth into, so pocketed and took home to the Labrador. Who left it...
Hope your tuner does your piano good!

[genaa]

hehe no children or iranian biscuits present here, at least none that I am either aware of or claiming any responsibility for!!

A labrador not eat something? ye gods!