DEBORAH CROMBIE: Do you believe that the appliances in your house can talk to each other? I am beginning to suspect that this is the case.
No, I haven’t started writing science fiction. But this is what happened at our house. A couple of weeks ago, the poor, ailing twenty-six year-old compressor in our downstairs AC unit just gave up the ghost. The house is zoned, so the two upstairs rooms, our bedroom and my office, are cooled by a smaller unit, but that meant no AC anywhere downstairs, including the kitchen. And of course this happened on a Friday night. The only good thing was that the high temps were in the upper eighties, rather than the upper nineties, and it was cooling off at night, but the humidity was swamp level. So we settled in with our mitigation strategy, opening windows at night and closing them in the morning, and absolutely NO COOKING! (Which wasn’t all that bad, at least for a week…)
The next day, our dryer went out.
And the next day, our water heater stopped heating.
And the day after that, our washing machine went crazy, repeating its rinse and spin cycle over and over and over.
By this time, I’m sure this is a plot. (Is this the universe telling me I need to write historical novels?)
So I’m taking cold baths, and I’m thinking a lot about all the modern conveniences we take so much for granted. Instant hot water. Air conditioning. Washers and dryers. When I first moved to Scotland in the seventies, my late mother-in-law expected me to help with the laundry. Being a spoiled American, I was astounded when I discovered the washing machine was a double-tub contraption that you rolled over to the sink and hooked up to the taps!
And that I had to hang all the laundry out on the clothesline in freezing Scottish midwinter!
(Not Scotland, but this is what it felt like.)
We had to replace our AC, there was no fixing the old thing. Rick managed (with lots of help from me!) to get our water heater and our washing machine working again. The dryer apparently healed itself.
But these temporary deprivations made me wonder what I would least want to do without. (I’m afraid to even mention refrigerators, in case ours catches the bug.) In the southern US, air conditioning is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. And hot water really is nice, even in the summer…
REDS and readers, what modern convenience can you not imagine living without?
And do you think your appliances communicate via a secret code?
