OTHER PLANS

Tomorrow there should be new air conditioners installed here by the time I get home from work. Should be. I'm not counting on it, though. One of them was already delivered once. It was the kind meant for slider type windows and although I did give the nice college student who waited on us the right measurements, as it turns out, it didn't fit. I didn't think it would, but he was so confident about the whole thing that I was swayed. We bought these at a local chain that's been supplying the region with appliances since Noah needed a matched washer/dryer set for the Ark. It used to be that, while the salespeople might be a little over-eager, they did the job fulltime and knew the product lines pretty well. You could ask questions. They'd answer them. It worked out that way. Now it seems that's not happening anymore. The college student was very nice, very bright - he's going to a good school, too. But you can bet that home appliances aren't even in his radar for a future career and he doesn't know a whole lot about them now. When we went back to the store to get the situation rectified we figured we might get someone who was in appliances for the long haul, but no. A gentleman who was around my age (probably a refugee from a career that's recently become obsolete) came forward to help but said the whole thing looked complicated and kindly located our original sales student. Thanks a heap.

So, I'm not optimistic about tomorrow's mission being accomplished. I wasn't even sure we should do it at all. We have one air conditioner now. It's being replaced. It works great unless it's really hot out. I'm hoping that the next one will even work on hot days, but I did feel kind of guilty about the whole thing. Air conditioning is not environmentally friendly. Probably we could learn to do without it. I go back far enough to remember when almost no one I knew had a home air conditioner. I thought long and hard about how we coped with the heat in the good old days. And then I remembered. We were really, really hot. Sometimes we had heart attacks, but only occasionally. We used fans. We still do. But if all you have is hot air, they mostly push the hot air around. Drug stores and other shops that were air conditioned let you know it with a door decal. The Kool cigarettes penguin announced, "Come in, it's Kool inside." Sometimes that's all you needed to see. People went to the movies a lot. By the time I was a kid most movies were air conditioned. The summer I was expecting my daughter, the movie theater the only place I got any sleep. My husband said the snoring was a problem, but it didn't bother me any.

So, we're going to be air conditioned again, assuming that the logistics ever get worked out.