If you’ve been following the news from the San Fernando Valley (which is in Los Angeles county; that’s for our international readers), you’ve noticed that it’s 104 degrees today and that the hills and mountains that surround my city are on fire. It’s hot.

So this morning, of course, the downstairs air conditioning went out. My idea was to stay upstairs in bed all day drinking ice-cold Newcastle and watching obscure foreign silent films from my Netflix queue. My wife had other ideas (something that when I was a kid we called “chores”) so she presented me with a list of things to do. This list required my coming downstairs into the inferno. So, lest we risk melting into Margaret Hamilton-like puddles, she got right onto calling some HVAC repair company that had come out the last time we had truly needed air conditioning. While we were waiting for the repairman, my wife ran down the list of what it couldn’t be that was wrong, because she had gone outside and pried open some panel and looked inside and made some indeterminate determination while I was inside drinking coffee and eating an English muffin while attacking Shaka Zulu in Civilization 4 on my laptop. (These are our usual priorities.) She floated guesstimates of the damage. Here’s the one that caused me to look up and lose a Destroyer to enemy bombardment:

“If it’s the compressor, it could be two thousand dollars.”

Many streams of sweat later, the repairman arrived. He went out back outside to take a look and I played with figures in my head. Would I have to sell one of my copies of “Iron Man” #1 to help pay for this repair job, and if so, which one? And if I were going to sell one, wouldn’t it be better to wait until after the second movie opened? And wouldn’t it make sense to wait until after the recession, too, so that its value would climb? And by then, with the recession over, I probably wouldn’t need to sell it anyway, and besides, by then the multi-thousand-dollar air-conditioning repair would be far in the past, the money long spent. So, good:  No need to sell any copies of “Iron Man” #1. Phew. I went back to pillaging Shaka’s horse pasture.

Eventually, I felt cool air coming back into the house. Valorie came in and said, “Well, he fixed it.”

I said, “How much?”

“He didn’t say.”

Hm. Unauthorized work. If it came to it, that would be the first argument in my haggling. She hung around in the kitchen area for a while doing something for some time, then went outside, then came back in. So I said again, “So, how much?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“What? Where is he?” I was trying to understand why he was still here, why we hadn’t paid anything yet, and why we didn’t know yet how much it was going to be.

“He went out to his van. He’s still there.”

Now we both stood at the front door looking at a white panel van parked across the street with “Air Conditioning Repair”emblazoned along its driver’s side. Nothing seemed to be happening. I still wanted to know how much this repair was. Then I said:

“$260.”

“What?”

“It’s going to cost around $260.”

Valorie wanted to know how I could possibly know this.  She looked at me skeptically. I told her she’d see.

A few minutes later we were called into the back yard where the air-conditioning repairman showed us the burnt-out. It sat in a box that had contained the new one, now installed. I looked at its outer casing and had to agree that it looked, well, dirty. And then he presented us with a bill for … $277. Valorie looked at me with surprise and appreciation.

“How did you know?” she said.

“I figured the time he was here, plus the probable cost of an industrial electronic component like that, plus over. And came up with $260.”

She seemed impressed. But frankly, neither of us cared. We were glad it hadn’t cost thousands of dollars, and we were really really really glad to feel cool air flooding the chambers. I had had visions of being un-air-conditiong in the airless triple-digit smoke-filled heat of Burbank through the rest of the weekend and into next week. Now, like Dante, we had escaped the inferno.

“$260 was the cost,” I said, cracking open a Newcastle anyway. “But the value was a lot more.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.