Cold! Cold cold cold!

Our heat went out last night, so we woke up in a very, very cold house. I don’t care what you Yan­kees say, we had a hard freeze here, so it real­ly was cold! There was snow on the car before we went to bed Tues­day night, and we had to get ice off the wind­shield to go see my pain spe­cial­ist today. I felt like I’d nev­er be warm again despite wear­ing the pret­ty gloves and scarf Sam bought for me a while back.¹I have got to get a “real” win­ter coat, but it feels like such a waste to do so in Geor­gia. Until days like today!

There was no response from the land­lord to email or many phone calls until late in the day. I hud­dled under the cov­ers most of the day, both to try to get warm and because my pain is always worse in cold weath­er. The land­lord even­tu­al­ly got some­one out to check the sys­tem late this evening.

The main­te­nance guy claimed the fil­ter was dirty. That’s pret­ty hard to believe since Sam changed it this morn­ing, and the sys­tem had­n’t run since then. But okay, maybe maraud­ing squir­rels came along and soiled it, or the big black spi­ders that spooked the main­te­nance man did it. What­ev­er. I’d fuss a lot more if he’d tried to say that was the rea­son the sys­tem died, but he did­n’t. He found some part that was bad, so he “bypassed the safeties” to get the heat back on.

“Bypassed the safeties” isn’t a hap­py thought to me. They exist for a rea­son, yes? Does that mean if the thing goes crazy it might explode instead of shut­ting down? He was­n’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly artic­u­late indi­vid­ual, and what he said made no log­i­cal sense, so I’m still in the dark about that.

He does­n’t know where to buy a new part. That isn’t com­fort­ing, either. See, he does main­te­nance for an apart­ment build­ing that our land­lord’s employ­er man­ages. He isn’t actu­al­ly employed by an HVAC com­pa­ny, and I’m pret­ty sure that if we checked he isn’t licensed to, say, han­dle refrig­er­ants or any­thing like that. Good thing it’s the heat instead of the air con­di­tion­ing, huh?²My Dad­dy has worked in HVAC for most of my life­time, so I’m more than slight­ly prej­u­diced about trained tech­ni­cians, rou­tine main­te­nance, and so on. He has no busi­ness crawl­ing around under our or any oth­er house at his age (and with his bad back and neck), so we don’t call him about prob­lems unless we need him to refer us to some­one else to fix them. Not to men­tion that the last time he did help us with this kind of prob­lem, the own­er of our pre­vi­ous home stiffed him on the bill for the parts (he had­n’t even charged labor!), so we don’t ever want to ask him to help out a land­lord again (or help us because a land­lord isn’t doing his or her job).

So the main­te­nance guy is going to talk to his boss at the apart­ment build­ing Fri­day to see if he can get a part through them to fix our fur­nace so we’ll have more reli­able heat. The land­lord and her fam­i­ly are in Orlan­do doing Dis­ney. Oh, hap­py day.³Of course, they don’t believe in hav­ing rou­tine main­te­nance done on the sys­tem, so they always end up pay­ing more for repairs when some­thing goes wrong than they would have paid to have it checked and ser­viced reg­u­lar­ly, and the equip­ment won’t last as long, either. Repairs usu­al­ly seem to be need­ed when they’re trav­el­ing some­where, too. It’s a Mur­phy thing.

The main­te­nance guy was nice enough to come here, at least, as a favor to our land­lord. Con­sid­er­ing that he’s lived here a very short time and had to be guid­ed in by phone, and had to call Sam for help find­ing his way back home, and he’d already done a full day of work, that was very nice of him. The poor guy knows noth­ing about any­where but a few blocks in mid­town, appar­ent­ly. Well, that’s what he knew this after­noon. His world has been expand­ed to include Decatur, now.

It’s much warmer in the house now, and it’ll be absolute­ly toasty in bed with my Sam­bear. Nitey nite!