Sounds cool to me

Every year, when it comes time to renew our home warranty, my wife and I have the same conversation:
ME: Should we renew our home warranty?
HER: Have you suddenly learned how to fix things?
So we always renew. Some people scoff at the home warranty notion, saying you never get your money’s worth out of it. More than likely, if I were to add up the cost of annual home warranties that I have paid, it would be WAY more than the replacements and repairs I have had done. That said, the amount I have paid in home warranties, I can only guess, is WAY less than the damage I would have caused had I tried to fix it myself.
A few years ago, our hot water heater developed a leak. For the price of a service fee, some people came out, took away the old one, and replaced it with a brand spanking new one. Without the home warranty, there is a good chance that I might have discovered the problem when my wife was not around, and I might have tried to repair it myself, which would have probably resulted in, at minimum, the collapse of the house. So in some ways, a home warranty for me is not just insurance, but a guarantee that I will behave.
Of course, there are the times when the home warranty repair guy comes out and performs a repair that is so simple, I am pretty sure I could have turned it over to my 3-year-old to solve. In these instances, the repairman usually looks at the situation, then looks at me as if he is on some hidden camera show, because there is NO WAY someone would call for a repairmen to fix the problem at hand. (“It’s not a leak. That’s the faucet. Turn this handle and the water stops.”)
That was somewhat the case with our latest home warranty call. For several weeks, we had a terrible knocking in our wall, right by our bedroom. Something in the air conditioning unit would start this terrible clanging, like someone was trying to crawl up the ducts. While they swung hammers. It was less than pleasant.
I called the home warranty folks and told them I need to place a service call. She asked what the problem was, and I said, “My children can’t sleep through the night.” There was a pause on her end, possibly as she contemplated career choices. We then had this conversation:
ME: See, there’s this knocking sound, I think associated with the air conditioner, and it wakes everyone up at night.
HER: Is the unit cooling the house?
ME: Yes, but it knocks.
HER: But it IS cooling the house, right?
ME: Not the point.
HER: Sir, is the unit cooling the house?
ME: If I answer yes, will you still come here and fix it?
HER: sigh.
Eventually, she managed to convince me that she was just getting as much information as possible to relay to the company. The repairman came when I was at work, so my wife handled it. She told him about the noise, and they proceeded to wait for about two hours to hear the noise. The A/C knew they were there, and remained silent. They’re sneaky like that.
Eventually, he went up in the attic and poked around for a few minutes. Turns out, there are three lines that feed from the attic unit down through the duct work. One had gotten some slack in the line, and when the A/C kicked on, this line was flailing back and forth, clanging the inside of the duct-work. He told my wife that I could fix it “with just a flashlight.” Yeah, me in a dark attic armed with a flashlight, trying to fix my air conditioner. No potential hazard there.
We haven’t heard the noise in a while, which has been nice. At one point, I told my wife that I was a little bummed that we had spent good money to have someone come cinch up the slack on a hose. She quickly put my mind at ease: “Oh, honey - you wouldn’t have had a clue what you were looking for up there.” Hopefully the problem is solved for good. If the noise starts again, I know exactly what I’ll do: I’ll get my wife a flashlight. I sure won’t know what to do.