Quote:
Originally Posted by JCFitz
That's weird as most motel owners are cheapskates when it comes to repairs.Some are so tight they squeak...lol.
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I had a run in with such an owner, back in the early '90's. They owned a bunch of flophouse motels and they had various models of RCA XL-100 19" color TV's that ranged in age from the early '70's up to the mid '80's. They thought I was going to come to the motel, pick up the TV's, fix them, and return them for about $10/TV. I let them know that I wasn't interested in even pulling the back off for $10. They then informed me that they only charged $17/night for the rooms. I think I ended up fixing one or two TV's on site that had minor problems and they ended up giving me 2 or 3 that they didn't want to spend the repair money on. I ended up fixing those and selling them for about $75/each (remember, you could still do that back then).
I had a friend who used to fix TV's for another motel. He said that getting paid wasn't a problem, as long as Americans owned the motel. He said that when the Indians bought the motel, things went down the drain. They'd let half the TV's break before they had any of them fixed. Then, they thought he should fix them for nothing and, many times, he had to stay on their back in order to even get paid. He finally had a belly full and ended up telling them what they could do with their TV's. Those TV's were early '80's 19" Magnavox sets that used the modular T809 chassis. That was the chassis that would eat regulator transistors and there was a 4-lead safety cap in the horizontal output collector circuit that would short. I actually had one of those TV's in my room as a teenager and I used it for several years, until I got tired of repairing the power supply.