Cooling Off – Special Post

Cooling Off

Sometimes things are easy. Two days ago, our northern air conditioner went on the fritz. That is the older half of our AC system in the house and if measured in BTU strength, it is also the smaller half of the system. I’m not sure that is a wise configuration, given the importance of AC to comfortable sleeping, but I inherited and retrofitted the HVAC and Hot Water systems in this house and the house itself went through expansion and retrofitting over its first dozen years before we came on the scene, so it simply is what it is. When my HVAC provider came earlier in the year for the annual check-up, they were quick to point out that the southern system that they had replaced a few years ago was AOK, but that the older northern system was harder to swear by and would come up for replacement sooner rather than later. So, it came as little surprise that it was the northern half that went offline on Sunday. It was also not so surprising that it should happen as the heat index has risen. That’s when all these systems go kaput.

It is also not surprising that the degree of difficulty of getting a service technician here was in the red zone on Sunday. Sunday’s are always hard, but hot summer Sundays are especially so. Nonetheless, I got on the phone to the HVAC team early and was relentless through four customer service reps and, ultimately, three supposed supervisors. My appointment time vacillated between Wednesday and Tuesday with a thinly-veiled threat of a Thursday appointment. I was one step away from having an HVAC phone rep use that old New Yorker cartoon line, “Thursday’s no good? How about never, is never good?” Finally, the threat that I would gladly wait for the supervisor to get off with another client and that I was one step away from calling another provider, caused the rep to secure for me an appointment for later that afternoon. Mission accomplished. I offered to give the rep a field promotion to supervisor, but she and I both know that was beyond my brief.

Not to mix metaphors, but I spent the day cooling my heels, hoping that the HVAC guys could fix my system today and not tell me about having to order parts on an embattled supply chain. In the last day, I have watched the weather.com 15-day forecast drive temperature highs up by 3-4 degrees. They have gone from high 80s to low 90s, so the urgency of a solution was ratcheting up. After all the back and forth with the customer service reps and supervisors, I was to wait for the last appointment of the day at 6pm, but the technician called at 3pm and asked if he could come early. That turned out to mean 5pm when a guy named Lex showed up. I showed him the dead as a doornail thermostats and then took him to the outside utility room where the HVAC system lives. He walked in, looked at the small PVC pipe on the top and said, “your water drain pipe is clogged”. With that, he took a small float valve out by hand (it looks like something jury-rigged rather than a part of the true mechanicals of the beast) and the Honeywell zone panel immediately lit up and started blinking. He explained that when the condensate gets a bit too overdone and the release valve gets jostled to an angle, this can happen and that its an easy fix.

We went upstairs and saw that both thermostats were now functioning again and the cool air was starting to pump through the vents. Problem immediately solved. He then went back down with a small piece of PVC pipe and cut it to length as a prop under the PVC pipe where the float valve sits, and explained that this would keep it from getting overwhelmed with condensing water and tip out of whack again. He took a picture of the rig for his files, had me sign two things on his iPad saying he had fixed the problem, changed the filter for good measure, and left to go home early to his family as he had hoped. He was happy (I also tipped him since I thought he did an exceptional job and made a big problem go away with a small solution). I was happy (I had learned something that might come in handy about fixing my system myself next time). The house was cooling off and all was well with my world.

Then I went in to settle in for the evening and watch the new series The Offer about the making of The Godfather. Before I could do so I suddenly saw an MSNBC newsflash that the FBI, under the direction of the Department of Justice and Merrick Garland, had obtained a Federal search warrant from a judge for probable cause to search Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate. Wow! At first I was cautious and thought it might be a meme or some other gag, but then it became clear that this had really happened and that the speculation was that the search was for documents that Trump had further withheld that were incriminating. Earlier this year, the National Archives retrieved fifteen boxes of materials from Mar-A-Lago that had been wrongly taken by Trump rather than submitted for archival purposes. That was bad enough, but, in theory, could have been an administrative oversight in the rush to get out of town back in January, 2021 for an ex-President that had incited an attempted coup through insurrection and had no intention of leaving until it became clear that he had no choice. Perfectly understandable, right? Well, apparently, someone got information at the FBI that those fifteen boxes had been cleansed of the most offending materials and that those materials had been criminally and intentionally retained by Trump at Mar-A-Lago and perhaps put into a personal safe that he keeps there. The FBI opened the safe much to the vocal chagrin of Mr. Trump, who must have been shitting a brick over all of this as he ran around NYC preparing for his mandated deposition in NYC Court over another of his legal entanglements. The irony of postponing a reprise of The Godfather, while our modern day Mafioso was being exposed yet again, was not lost on me.

The cable news pundits were suddenly out in force. One immediately realized why Rachel Maddow had decided that her once-a-week show would be on Mondays. This was big. The best comment I heard from several of the prosecutorial specialists was that when they heard of the search warrant, they wondered which of the MANY Trump faux pas were being sought out in the law enforcement action. Those same people made sure NOT to call this a raid, since it was the result of what must have been an excruciatingly careful review by a Federal Judge of a warrant filed with great care and accurate, verifiable precision by officers of DOJ, signed-off by Merrick Garland, an ex-Federal Judge himself and perhaps the most important jurist of our time (a toss-up designation with Clarence Thomas, I suppose I have to admit) and executed by the FBI under the watchful eye of Trump-appointee, Christopher Wray and coordinated with none other than the Secret Service detail assigned to protect the ex-president.

Stop and think about this in the context of the Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola script for The Godfather. A notorious, known gangster, perhaps todays veritable OG, much feared, much loved by his followers, much despised by his enemies, daring the world to take him on as the POTUS of all POTUSes. A mild-mannered and careful jurist who was wrongfully denied his spot on SCOTUS by that OG, and then made the chief law enforcement prosecutor of the nation, the AG. He has become a man scorned by the OG’s enemies who want him to act and act now, but he is too shrewd and he waits for the righteous evidence to proceed. He then gets the DOJ, which has been proven to have come deathly close to compromise under the OG in his waning moments when the old AG wanted to Un-AG himself, to issue a warrant that some Judge (likely the one holding the very same bench that the current AG used to hold) has to approve, knowing that he is marking an important place in history for himself for better or worse. Once issued, the FBI, that organization that succumbed to the pressure of the OG (under the very same Director who is in charge today) to blatantly but secretly look the other way about the Brett Kavanaugh investigation…the rushed installation of yet another SCOTUS member, was given the warrant to execute. That same FBI then had to advise the Secret Service, which is now VERY complicit with having destroyed its own documentation concerning those special two days in January, 2021. Wow! Is it any wonder China has lost respect for American Democracy?

Even though the house is cooled off, I am going to need more time for cooling off my brain after yesterday.