technology can be tricky

My great-aunt Sophie is well into her eighties, and the sweltering temperatures of late have convinced her to get an air conditioner. She had a window air conditioner before this, but as anybody with a window air conditioner will tell you, they simply aren’t able to cool a whole house. Despite this, she was determined to make this little air conditioner work overtime until it finally decided to give in and bring the temperature of her entire house down to comfortable levels. Being the stubborn air conditioner that it was, however, rather than agree to Aunt Sophie’s terms, it chose instead to simply stop working.

“It’s so darn hot in this house that I’m sweating through my pantyhose,” my aunt would complain…still wearing pantyhose because it’s ‘lady-like’ even though it’s summer and people are long past the stage of looking, or caring, much about her legs. “I’ve lived a long life and I think that I deserve to spend my remaining days in the comfort of a cool house!” And with this proclamation, central air found its way into Aunt Sophie’s house.

All in all, this is quite a step into modern life for my aunt…the same aunt who still refers to her refrigerator as an ‘ice box’. She’s never been a ‘gadget’ person, and complicated devices such as cell phones, answering machines, and remote controls, have never interested her in the least. Years ago, we bought her a VCR, thinking that she might enjoy watching a movie every now and then. That VCR sat on her television set, blinking 12:00, for two months, until one day it mysteriously disappeared to the back of her closet, having been replaced by a plant.

“It just wasn’t getting enough light in the kitchen,” she told us. The VCR was never seen again, and I can only hope that it learned to enjoy its life of rest and relaxation in the closet, right beside an old Scrabble game and a box containing an odd assortment of brass candle holders.

Still, weeks of ninety degree weather have convinced her that some gadgets are actually pretty nice, and central air conditioning was installed. I dropped by to see her the other day, yet another blistering hot afternoon, and I found her sitting out on the porch in a lawn chair.

“Why aren’t you inside enjoying your new air conditioner?” I asked.

“The doggone thing doesn’t work right! It’s hotter in there than it is out here, so I decided just to enjoy the afternoon on my porch.”

Over the years, I have found that I’m much more skilled at taking things apart rather than actually fixing things. However, I decided to take a look at the air conditioner in the hopes that the problem would reveal itself to me.

Shortly after heading in, she joined me and asked, “can you tell what’s wrong with it?”

I looked at her and said, “aunt Sophie, you've got the heat on. It's been running all afternoon.”

She stuck her nose up against the thermostat and squinted, in an attempt to read the settings differentiating between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, until she finally gave up and said, “well who in the world can tell when they make those words so small!”

I put a blue dot in permanent marker by the ‘cold’ setting in the hopes that this would help with her future cooling needs. Though I worry that I’ll return one day to find Aunt Sophie passed out in a puddle of sweat, having mistaken the blue dot for red. Because judging from the odd hues of blue and pink that tints her hair after she goes to the store to buy hair dye, I’m not sure that colors are quite as bright as they once were.

But this may just be due to the tiny lettering on the package.