About six months ago, the ceiling fan in our family room whirred annoyingly when it ran at medium speed. After buying a new one at our local hardware store, I hired a handyman to install it, and for five months it worked just fine. Then one day when I pulled the chain to turn on the fan, it emitted a faint, frequent tick-tick-tick.

When I called Steve, our handyman, to ask if he could take a look at it, he said he couldn’t get to it for a couple of weeks. By the day he came, the constant tick-tick-tick had become about as disturbing as a certain kind of water torture.