It’s Hot Somewhere

I’m not sure what to blame this post on. Men? Money? Fix-it companies?

Sigh.

Our air conditioning broke about two weeks ago when we had that huge heat wave in Southern California. Clearly a first world problem, our upstairs unit worked fine and the downstairs unit broke. Yes, we have two units. Since the upstairs unit ALSO cools my downstairs office, I didn’t really care. I had a portable fan blowing on me, my office was cool, other than that I wasn’t much affected.

So we talked about getting it fixed in a few weeks. One of my friends gave me the number of a guy who has helped a bunch of local families out, I promptly forgot about it. Until the husband told me that someone was coming this afternoon when he would be out and about with the kids. Me being in marketing, I asked how he found him. “Oh, somewhere.” Fine. I guess I won’t ask if they had the best Yelp reviews and if you had two friends give you an approval via social media.

The AC guy showed up and was immediately irritatingly friendly. I don’t know about you but I hate friendly people. It’s okay to be polite but when you are overly friendly it starts becoming creepy. “Wow, what a view! Do you have kids? It’s like Google Maps out there, look at those freeways. I have 2 kids. Well, three, one is on the way. Can I tell you about how your stuff works? I’ll give you a quiz at the end and you can get a discount.”

My Dirty Air Conditioner

I’m pretty much of the type that if it’s broke, just freaking fix it. I don’t really care about all the details. (Hint, this is where my husband comes in handy!) I do come off as an extremely dumb housewife but then again, do I really care? No, I really don’t.

Anyway. He wanders about and looks at everything and tells me the broken part. A dual something or other. I have no interest but it sounds reasonable. I mean, the AC is broken and it’s hot. So yea, I want it fixed. Since we had an actual price floating around, I didn’t want to have the conversation and then immediately have to repeat it all to the husband so I call the husband and hand the phone over and after they have a longish conversation while I’m reading the material about the awesome! service program! we can sign up for! and receive a discount!… he says thank you and hands the phone over to me. I get on it and the husband tells me that he told him no thanks and to just pay him his initial service fee.

Awkward! I hang up the phone and smile and this poor little creepy friendly guy looks like we kicked his puppy. “Well, he said… no. I can’t fix your unit.” What can I do? All I can do is smile and go get the checkbook.

Can I also mention how cell phones are so personal? After he talked on the phone, he wiped it off on his sleeve (yes, polite!) but that creeped me out. EWW, is your sweat on my precious phone? I would never even think that way about an old style phone. What do you even call those things anyway? The things my kids will have no clue how to operate? Rotary phones sounds extremely old.

So that was my fun awkward adventure for the day. I’m still cringing.

The husband called someone we had used previously that he liked (that he forgot about) and they can do it for half the cost. So all is better but whew, that was fun.