Last Friday, I left work in mid-afternoon to begin a weekend baseball trip. But when I walked into my house, I heard this grating "scrape, scrape, scrape" coming from the clothes dryer. Sounded like someone had left a Happy Meal toy in their pocket, or something.

"What's the deal?" I asked my wife.

"It's been doing that all day, but it's not in the clothes, it's in the dryer somewhere. Don't turn it off. I need those clothes for the trip."

"All day? Don't you think we might be causing a bigger problem by running it?"

"What was I going to do? It's drying the clothes. I've just had to put up with that irritating noise all day."

(I stood there thinking of that old joke where the wife tells her husband that she had a flat tire that day. "Oh, I hope it didn't give you too much trouble," he says. "No. It was just that annoying 'thump, thump, thump' all the way home!")

As soon as she went upstairs, I turned the dryer off. Not that I don't trust her, but I wanted to see for myself just to...uh...get a different perspective. I began rotating the drum by hand to see if I could isolate the scraping. Sure enough, it was coming from the right side of the dryer.

Now I'm not the mechanical sort. I don't take things apart. I know myself well enough to know that if any more than two parts are involved, whatever I've dismantled ain't goin' back together. Add a rubber belt to the equation and I might as well be trying to solve Rubik's cube while hanging upside-down in a wind tunnel.

So I played to my strength and got on the web. I went to Maytag.com and clicked on "Find an appliance servicer near you." The next page showed a logo of ServiceMagic and I knew I was in business. ServiceMagic is a household service provider that uses a Microsoft Speech Server application to contact its technicians. It's mostly used as a "push" application, though it does enable customers like me to call in and interact with its voice response system. I chose instead to use their web interface.

I filled out a short form and sent off my request. Within 2 minutes, I received a confirmation email, and less than a minute later, I got another email with the name and number of a local dryer repairman. This was too easy.

I called the guy and he said he could come by in an hour or so. Since I wanted to get on the road ASAP (had a 4-hour drive ahead), I said let's make it Monday morning. 10:00? Perfect.

We had a good weekend at the baseball tournament. My son played well. We took 2nd. (Should've won it all. Had a late 3-run lead in the Final, but just couldn't hold on. I really don't want to talk about it.)

The repairman showed up right on time Monday morning, listened to the dryer, and gave me one of those "I don't like the sound of that" looks that usually translates into large denomination bills. But after about 20 minutes he found the culprit: a loose screw. [Insert your own punch line here.]

He tightened it, put the dryer back together, only charged me for labor and I was a happy man. As I walked him back out to his truck, I asked him how he liked the ServiceMagic system.

"Love it," he said. "I advertise with ServiceMagic and in a local paper and in the phone book. I get a ton more leads from ServiceMagic than the other two combined."

"How about the application that calls your cell phone automatically?"

"That works really well," he said. "It also texts me and sends an email so I can get the lead no matter where I am."

This story is all true, in case you're wondering. If the guy had hated ServiceMagic or the voice application, I'd have said so. But my experience with ServiceMagic and the repairman's experiences were really excellent. And knowing that it was all done using Microsoft Speech Server makes me even more confident that we're building a pretty good product.

Nothing like a little empirical evidence to boost my day.

Cup o' Joe
Every so often, Phil the Coffee Junkie stops by Trader Joe's to check out their coffee selection. This week he picked up a can of their Kauai blend, so named because it's roasted from "premium Arabica beans" that are found on the leeward side of Kauai, Hawaii's wettest island. This morning he brewed it up. "Straight Kauai. No blends today." It tasted like a good medium roast. Good, not great. One of those coffees that smells better than it tastes. Still, it was satisfying in an "I just got a major appliance fixed and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg" kind of way.