Friendly young men with hard hats are just standing by to fix your broken air conditioning units!

My air conditioner broke last week.

*thunderous applause from the bitches in the front row*

It wasn’t my actual outdoor air conditioning unit, because that would have been a complete apocalyptic disaster in early July. This happened to me in the good ol’ pre-COVID days of two-thousand-ought-one-niner. Five years ago, that is, 2019, for all the bitches in the front row who can’t understand the Queen’s Notation. THAT happened in the month of May when, in today’s climate change-fucked world where lobsters the size of dachshunds are terrorizing polar bears in the arctic circle and natives in remote eastern Borneo are dying of hypothermia, the weather was still yet to turn summery. The compressor on the outdoor unit was cracked, and my HVAC guy — let’s call him “Guy”, mostly because that’s his name — told me it was fucked all to hell and it would cost me $4500 to install a brand new unit. He did it the next day. It took him about five hours while I idly twiddled my thumbs in the next room with little to do other than eat bugs and watch ’90s episodes of Jerry Springer on VHS tapes I stole from my childhood bedroom.

I hadn’t had a problem since then, but for five years I was on my guard. Every year, at the first sign of summer, on that first sunny 72° day (or 22°C for you filthy un-American scum), during that first time I clicked on the air conditioner, I would pray to Sobek the Crocodile God that everything would run smoothly and that giant rats didn’t chew through all the wires on the inside unit out of starvation during the previous harsh Chicago winter. And every year, for five years, everything ran smoothly with no issues.

Don’t be alarmed! It’s just the unit kicking on!

I could say the same for 2024. The first time I switched on that air conditioner in April or May, everything started up with no cause for alarm. I lived my days in blissful, narcotic-addled naivety until that fateful day of July 2nd. After spending my entire morning and evening whipping feral pigs into a frenzy in the salt mines for $160 per hour, I came home to a very startling smell in the house. I thought there was a fucking gas leak and, for the briefest of minutes, I was preparing to make arrangements to move my family into a Motel 6 for the duration of the rest of our lives. After checking the stove, opening all the windows, and noticing that none of my carbon monoxide detectors were wailing loud enough to be able to be heard in Shanghai, I realized pretty quickly that the air conditioner was running without the fan. We keep the air conditioner set at 70°; the shitty Ecobee smart thermostat that, frankly, isn’t very smart, was hovering at 72°. THINGS WERE CERTAINLY AMISS!

Mind you, this was about 5:30pm on a Tuesday and all I wanted to do that evening was pop open a Red Bull, stay up until 1am watching Six Feet Under, and dread the inevitable fall of America to fascism. Was that so much to ask? Now I had to worry about being able to fix my failing air conditioning within the next two days before shoving off on a long holiday weekend? Fuck that noise!

Since I’m in a texting relationship with Guy the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Guy, I immediately buzzed his ass and asked him sweetly and politely if he could please put down his Stouffer’s lasagna TV dinner, get off his lazy ass, and come over to my shitty third-floor condominium unit to see why my home was filling up with noxious fumes. He texted back “How about tomorrow?”

Fine. Tomorrow.

Luckily the weather outside wasn’t frightful. It was only a balmy 108° or so, just a few degrees above heat stroke conditions even while lying supine on your bed, not moving a muscle, and in complete silence lest the friction of your vocal chords causes your neck to burst into unquenchable flames. One night of barely sleeping shouldn’t be too big a deal, right? Plus, on the bright side, I love sleeping in a pool of my own sweat while my vision shimmers like a highway in August at 3pm during drought season on Venus.

The next morning finally came, and I had to call my work and call off for the 54th time this year. This time it was for a legitimate reason! Not like usual where I call in for reasons like “I HAVE TO DELOUSE MY PET IGUNANA” or “MY YOUNGEST DAUGHTER STUCK A NUCLEAR WARHEAD IN THE ELECTRICAL SOCKET”. And because I’m a bigwig down at the truck decal factory, they understood and allowed me to stay home to get my air conditioner fixed without getting fired. God Bless Capitalism.

Pictured: Me dressed as Super Mario attempting to fix my air conditioner myself by hitting it with a wrench until the suspicious sound goes away.

Guy showed up with his giant wagon full of hammers and pliers to assess the damage. The pit in my stomach dropped (the new one from the previous night, not the one that’s already there on a near-constant basis) when he popped open the cover and told me that the entire circuit board was burnt. “Something happened here, man,” Guy said astutely. Something did happen there, man, and it was so unusual that Guy mumbled stuff like “this is unusual” as he poked around looking for the culprit. It was the blower fan indeed, as evident by the fact that the blower fan refused to run! Apparently, the fan was so old that it shorted out the previous afternoon while I was at work, lighting my unit on fire for God-only-knows how long and completely destroying the circuit board. This also explained the awful paint-peeling stench in my house, the one that will not go away until at least 2034 when A.I. will be smart enough to come over to my house for a nominal fee and fart Glade air freshener all over my unit.

Guy made me very nervous as he muttered sentiments like “this is all fucked up, bro” and “this is going to cost thousands of dollars to fix”. For a few minutes there, it sounded like I was going to have to move out of my house and rent a cabin in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland in order to stay cool for the rest of the summer. However, after some more poking and prodding, Guy decided that he may have the parts to fix the circuit board and rewire the whole indoor unit without having to delay in any capacity. I slammed a crisp $10 on the table and said “Go for it, El Jefe!” Neither I, nor Guy, spoke Spanish.

So what ensued was a morning of many colorful sounds emanating from the next room, such as metal scraping against metal, pieces of junk falling to the floor, and Guy muttering and swearing sweatily under his breath in a fashion that said to me “better book your flight to Greenland soon buddy.”

Live-action footage of my money leaving my bank account after an A/C unit repair.

Here’s the twist ending! Guy is the fucking man, of course, and he completed a full restoration of my indoor unit in less than 2.5 hours. He also INCLUDED, BASICALLY FOR FREE, a full wellness check of my outdoor unit INCLUDING recharging, sealing, and humming it sweet lullabies. Now I don’t have to move to the middle of nowhere and make my living hunting whales, which is an activity that I do not perform well at.

The moral of the story is this: move into a house where nothing ever breaks and you won’t have an anxiety attack every 45 minutes. I’m currently working on this, and I’ll let you know how it goes when I figure out how to accomplish my goals.