Little Slice of Hell

So here’s a little slice of hell.  Our air conditioner is broken down and it’s 98’ out with a heat index of 105’.  Minus the visible flames licking at my heels, I’m sure this is the full on heat of hell and I vow here on out to live a better life if only to avoid having to spend eternity in that great inferno. I mean, I’ve only been dripping sweat miserable in this for about a day, but I already can’t stand it.

My husband discovered the problem with our air conditioner late yesterday afternoon.  I guess he thought the house felt too warm and he went outside to check the unit.  He came back in saying the little red light was on indicating that the power company had assumed control of the unit, cycling it off to conserve energy in a period of peak demand.  But that didn’t sound right to me.  Peak demand?  Up until about 3:00 yesterday afternoon we’d had rain and clouds for an entire week.  Temperatures most days hadn’t made their way out of the 60s.  So how there could be such a huge demand causing the electric company to turn off our air conditioner was beyond me.  I could understand if temperatures had been high for days on end, but not when they’d only been elevated for some three hours.

I urged my husband to call the power company.  He did and came back to report that they had not, in fact, turned anyone’s AC unit off, not even ours.  And they were not experiencing a peak demand.

So it was our problem.  The utility company wouldn’t be turning our AC back on because they weren’t the ones who had turned it off.  Next, my husband shut the whole unit off and then back on from the thermostat inside the house.  Maybe it would work then, like how you sometimes have to shut the #%$&%@! computer off and turn it back on again to get it to work right.

But that didn’t help at all.  My husband came back in and shut the AC down for the evening.  He said that when he’d restarted it, the unit outside was making a horrible grinding noise and it was blowing hot air from its sides.  Worried it would get hotter and hotter and hotter until it would self combust, we had to leave it off.  He called the service company who said they would come out and take a look sometime after noon today.  When it’s supposed to be even hotter outside.  The thought alone was enough to get me all hot and bothered.  But not in an Ellen Barkin – Dennis Quaid Big Easy kind of way.  More like a red faced and sweaty after a 13 mile run, and pissed off that the air conditioner isn’t working bothered kind of way.  Not sexy at all, that.

As the sun set, we opened windows around the house.  A hot breeze, we thought, might be better than no breeze at all.  No?  I’d say it was a draw except for the animal outside that was croaking-chirping in the backyard.  Was it a frog?  Was it a bird?  It wasn’t Superman, that’s for sure.  Whatever it was, it croak-chirped outside the bedroom window all night long while the ceiling fan swirled hot and humid air around the room.   I imagined this must be what it feels like to sleep in a rain forest.  The carpeting in our hallway felt damp.

The service guy showed up at 4:00 in the afternoon today and determined that our air conditioner’s fan had burnt up.  As luck would have it, he doesn’t carry fans on his truck. He also declined to rig up our table top fan to work the AC for us.  I thought that would be a good stop-gap measure but apparently service guy is just a mean and lazy bastard.  He insisted that he has to order the part and it should be in Monday, maybe Tuesday.  Which means they can install it on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.

Now we’ve got the shades drawn, the lights off, and fans circulating wherever we can.  We’ve spent the better part of the day in the basement where it’s at least 5 degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house.  But I’m not sure how much longer we can stay here.  The chocolate in my cupboards is melting, which means it’s officially time to do something.  First, I think I’ll eat the chocolate.  Then, I think I’ll take a look at the list I made last night.  The list of places I know of that do have air conditioning:  the mall, the bookstore, the frozen food section of the grocery store, the video arcade, the movie theater, friends and relative’s houses, the interior of my car until it runs out of gas…  We might pack up and go to one of them.  Any place cooler than this house will be a little slice of Heaven.