John Dees, a field service technician since 2011, services AC units across multiple customer locations daily. He emphasizes that regular maintenance following operator manuals prevents component failures and extends equipment life, and he prefers the road work and customer interactions over shop jobs.
What's a typical day like for you?
Um, most days it's just catching up on services for customers before they get busy. Start of the season, normally have some things come up. This time of year, mostly AC. We got to keep— make sure the customers stay cool when they're out there operating. But it varies. It could very well be anything and everything. Every day is a new adventure, so to speak.
What time do you usually get started?
How many customers can you hit a day? Um, depending on how severe the issue is, uh, normally can get to about 4 to 5, but it just depends on diagnosing and what it takes to fix it and how many trips it takes to get it knocked out.
So, and how important is like the customer keeping up with the typical main maintenance? Make your job a little harder, or is it— is that not— doesn't really matter?
Uh, the customer keeps up with their— the normal daily and annual maintenance that they have to, uh, for the customers to do that's in the operator's manual. They, uh, it normally makes it in a sense easier because it prevents any issues or any early failures on any components. So most of the time the machine can last longer out in the field and keep doing what it needs to do and intended to do.
Would you rather be on the road like this or would you rather be in the shop every day?
I definitely enjoy the road. Get to have a one-on-one experience with the customers. Get to go out to the property and There's a lot more excitement on the road because you don't have the option of being close to everything. So you don't know what you might get into when a call comes on the road because most of the time it's a dire experience and they got to get back up and going. Don't have the ability to just take it to the shop and have it down for a while.
Tell me about your background. Where'd you, where'd you learn how to do this and how long you've been doing it?
Started working on a pecan orchard my stepdad managed and found out they had a John Deere program. It was down in Thomasville at the time. So as soon as I graduated high school, I went down there and applied and I've been doing this since 2011, so 15 years. I wouldn't change it.
