How NOT to Fix an Air Conditioning Unit

By
Amy Vansant

With the terrible heat this summer, we’ve noticed the basement feels like a vampire vacation home while the rest of the house has me spending the day in Mike’s old boxers (built-in venting).   A quick inspection of a leaky blower unit revealed much of our air conditioning never made it upstairs to the living area.

Upside: the wine in the basement was well chilled. Downside: Let’s not pretend the wine stays in the basement very long.

Finding leaks is the moment where actual adults call an HVAC guy, or where my Dad tugs up the pants on his non-existent butt and says something like “Whatcha got here is…”  But Mike and I have a different philosophy:

“Professionals” are for losers without Extreme Jerry-rigging Skills.

Mike found a can of  ”Great Stuff,” a calking-type agent that clung to a Mars probe in 1987 and secretly traveled to Earth in a quest to conquer the universe.  Naturally, we’d used it once before, so the cap was off, the straw applicator was AWOL and we had to stab it repeatedly with a shish kabob skewer to get the volatile substance flowing again.  Once flowing, we were powerless to stop it and had to leap into action with little preparation or planning.

Aware that our first attempt resembled a rampant mold, Mike attempted to smooth the Great Stuff with his fingers, which promptly sealed those digits together like a zip-lock bag.  I attempted to help him, which turns out is a lot like trying to help someone out of quicksand by walking into the quicksand.

We spent about three terrifying minutes with our fingers stuck to each other’s fingers. I had a flash of my parents breaking into the house a week later to find us dead from starvation, covered in foam and stuck together at the fingers. “Well, we knew this would happen some day,” they would sigh.

I finally unstuck myself from Mike and kept clear. He applied the substance and tried to avoid touching other things. By the end, he had become a Human Flytrap, covered with thread, dust, skin from his own chin, receipts, a ruler and the dog. I should have taken him upstairs and rolled him around on the sofa to give the cushions a good cleaning or sold him to a family with a dog that sheds.

The project finished long before the can ran out of Great Stuff, which it turns out is some sort of perpetual motion machine. We threw it into a box where it continued to create an evil, sentient blob for the rest of the day.

And that, kids, is how the world we knew ended, and why we are now all enslaved to Martian blob monsters.