I wake up at 7:00am to the sound of a loud fire alarm. It must be national test-your-fire-alarm-day. I remember those from middle school. I try to go to sleep, but it’s no use.
I flop out of bed, head to the kitchen and make some breakfast. After breakfast I go back into my room and I hear a wheezing noise. After a bit of investigation I realize that it’s the intake for the air conditioner that’s making the racket. I flip the air conditioner on and off – the only repair move I can think of. It doesn’t work.
When I get back to work it’s 85 degrees in the apartment according to the thermostat. It feels hotter – I’m used to a breezy 73. After a day or two I realize that it’s not going to fix itself and I call the repair man. It takes him a few days to fix it.
During the 6 days or so that I had no air conditioner, I gradually adjusted to the heat. By the end I actually enjoyed it. When the repair was finally completed, I didn’t bother turning the air conditioner back on.
Let’s think about this for a second – why the hell is 72 degrees the standard temperature that we like so much? There are people in Africa with no air conditioning who live in 100 degree heat that don’t complain about it. I spend thousands of dollars a year adapting the environment to me. Why not just adjust to the environment and save all that money?
So far it’s been a month or so, and I haven’t used the air conditioning or heater at all (twice someone else used it…) and everything’s been fine. It’s going to start getting colder, so we’ll see how long I last!
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