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A little while back, I was talking to the Mild Ex, and she commented that the air conditioning at her place was acting up. In it of itself, that was a bad thing. However, this conversation happened to take place right in the middle of a miniature heat wave. So the fact that the air conditioning was performing less than optimally was less of an annoyance and more of an actual problem. It wasn't going to kill her or anything, but it certainly didn't make her days any more pleasant.

Worse yet, I wasn't in a position to remedy the situation in any discernible way. For one, I was sitting at home, she was sitting at home, and our two homes happened to be quite a few miles apart. Secondly, even if I had driven over there, I wasn't sure that I had the knowledge or the magical powers required to restore her air conditioning to satisfactory levels. Things were not looking good for our hero (that'd be me).

Well, out of some combination of sheer curiosity, dogged determination, and just plain being nosy, I decided to see what non-AC solutions we could come up with to her heat problem. I took to the Internet, and surprisingly, there were several potential solutions to this problem. For example, any kind of ice placed in front of a fan would result in a cool breeze. Also, lining up a couple of fans in a straight line would create something like a wind tunnel; if there's even a hint of a cool breeze already wafting through a room, this would magnify the cooling effects. You get the idea. My search proved fruitful, and I had some tips for the Mild Ex.

Excited by my findings, I relayed this information to the Mild Ex. She was thoroughly amused by my efforts, and thanked me for the tips. As it turned out, she didn't actually need to implement any of them, but she was still grateful that I'd tried to help in my own nerdy way. Happy with having done my good deed for the week, I moved on with the rest of my day.

However, I had a conversation with my brother shortly after this, and he complained that his air conditioning was also on the fritz. Well, this was a known problem with a known solution. My engineer pulse raced just a little bit, and I excitedly told my brother all about what I had learned earlier. He listened to my information, then he paused for a moment. After that, he asked me, "when the heck do you have time to find this stuff?" Not quite the reaction I was expecting, but it drew a laugh nonetheless. Funnily enough, I would later tell the Mild Ex of this exchange, and she replied with, "okay, good. I'm glad I wasn't the only one to think that." Cue much more laughter.

I soon forgot all about this, but as fate would have it, my sister's air conditioning also gave out. Now, she lived in an area that was dealing with one of the hottest, driest summers in recent memory, so she was also pretty unhappy with this turn of events. By this point, I had my whole shpiel down. I didn't even need a whole email or a phone conversation. I managed to get across the key points in about two text messages (practice makes perfect indeed). She did not question my time management, but she did wonder what would happen to these schemes if you mixed a cat in to the process. The phrase "baby twister with claws" soon came to pass, and I couldn't help but laugh yet again.

At the end of all this, though, I've decided on a few things:

  1. The people I care about seem to have some very questionable air conditioning
  2. I may have to hope for a heat wave in my own neck of the woods just to implement some of these ideas. Sure, I could just let it go, but this is me we're talking about. My curiosity is bound to get the best of me.
  3. The reactions to my air conditioning-related advice is sheer comedic gold. I'm going to have to keep handing it out just to see what happens next.
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