Word: repairmen
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...Italian or German driver burns out his batteries with his horn and uses his car as an instrument of vengeance ("In Germany," says one psychoanalyst, "anger is a status symbol"), the American knows that he must drive as part of a group. Although Americans endure queues, bad service, inept repairmen, and surly sales help with remarkable stoicism, French Philosopher Jacques Maritain once suggested that they are impatient with life itself. Yet almost everyone has to learn patience in a complex modern society characterized by the growing interdependence between men and the growing reliance on brittle machines...
...boast about either). It is commonplace for a French operative to take days or weeks to answer a call, then, after fumbling about for a bit, to leave a flood where only a drip had existed before. Capitalizing on the general state of disrepair among France's repairmen, SOS's two young owners have built up a $1,000,000-a-year business out of providing prompt and relatively effective service. Gerard Verger, 33, and Joel Laval, 31, started SOS (telephone SOS 99-99) in 1961 with two motorcycles and two trucks. Today, they operate 100 trucks...
...meet its need for 800 new pilots a year. Pan American has dropped its insistence on a college degree. All four auto producers have set up training centers (General Motors has 30, Ford 56), summer seminars and mobile classrooms in an effort to solve a growing shortage of auto repairmen. In 1950 there was one repairman for every 70 cars on the road; today that ratio has slipped to one per 117-while auto innards have grown more complex...
...theory that shoppers are exhausted by week's end and welcome such a break. The Denver Dry Goods Co. requires its buyers to remain on the sales floors during peak hours, both to keep salespeople alert and to help customers with shopping problems. Sears, Roebuck reminds its repairmen to shine their shoes, and Chicago's Polk Bros, requires its delivery men to remove shoes before walking over fancy wall-to-wall carpeting...
...color TV tubes to 1,000,000 a year. Last week both Texas Instruments and Polaroid hit new highs on news that they were working together to produce a new, less expensive color tube-even though it may be years before the tube can be marketed. Even TV repairmen are acting bullish again. Reason: color sets are more complicated to keep in order than black and white. Aware of the boom elsewhere, some TV repairmen now charge $8 for a color call v. $5 for attending a sick black and white...