August 1, 2005
On Tuesday, when temperatures hit 107° F, I decided that I really ought to fire up the A/C. I closed the windows, cleared a lot of the stuff out of my storage area to give the unit some breathing room just like the landlord recommends (even though the actual heat exchanger is on the ground under my bedroom window), set the thermostat for 72 and fired it up.
Three hours later it was a few degrees hotter. The thermometer on the wall stops at 90°, and it was beyond pinned. I figure the place was getting rather close to the external temperature. So I did just like my family had alawys done when it was hot out -- I opened the windows, cranked up the fans and basically just sucked it up.
Wednesday afternoon I called the landlord to get the A/C fixed (turns out the fan motor was bad). When I told the guy that I noticed it last night he was actually surprised that I hadn't called the 24-hour line. "We would've sent someone right out," he said.
This completely boggled my mind. I realize I'm from the frozen tundra as far as people around here are concerned, but a couple days over 100° with no A/C does not constitue an emergency for me. It just means that I sit in front of the fan and don't do much. (As opposed to any other day, when I don't do much regardless of fan placement.)
Help me out here... I was 15 or 16 when Mom and Jim got married, and we first acquired air conditioning when we all moved in with him. And even then we rarely used it. Is it really that odd that I didn't think of 107° with no A/C as a get-out-here-now type of problem?
