The Buro Group

I can’t believe how hot this Summers has been. I think the record books are going to change when this is all over. I love the heat, don’t get me wrong, but only when I have the option to cool down. Unfortunately my air conditioner hasn’t been working all that well lately. I work in an air conditioned office, but my partner is home all day by herself and she has been having some problems. I get upset phone calls from her telling me how hot the house is. I thought she was exaggerating, when I got home I found out otherwise. The place was like an oven, and I was the main course. I had bought a large box of chocolates and left them on the counter, they were all melted, a liquid mess of delicious chocolate. That was the last straw, you can heat up my home and upset my girl but you do not mess with a man’s chocolate.

I needed air conditioning repairs, Melbourne so hot it was like living in a furnace. The air con hadn’t worked properly since last Summer, it had been sitting there unused for most of the year, now when I needed it the most I got warm air blowing out of it. Thankfully I had the number for a company that does air conditioning service in Caulfield. I knew that I would be bathed in cool air again soon. It was too hot to eat, and everything was sweaty, including my cats. They looked very unhappy with me, with their little ears pointed down and a sad look on their faces. I knew relief was on its way, I just had to find a way to stay cool until the air conditioning repair company from Melbourne could do their magic. My girlfriend decided to leave me for another man who has a working air con, I can’t say that I blame her. I’m sure she’ll come back once she sees that my air conditioner is working again.

Everyone’s going on and on about the weather this week. It’s like, yeah, I get it. It’s as cold as a fridge inside. And so what? It’s winter; it’s meant to be cold. If it was warm, you’d be going on about that with at least as much fervour, although I’d probably be more into hearing about it because at least it would be noteworthy. 

I know for a fact that most of the people I’ve heard doing this have some kind of heating system. Most of them have ducted heating, a few have split systems and at least one has a rather nice wood-fuelled setup. And here they are telling me about the cold. As someone who doesn’t have any kind of heating system in place beyond a hot water bottle, a ski suit, a bath and a hard-working kettle, I’m well aware of the temperature, yet you don’t hear me complaining about it. 

I stopped bothering with climate control systems after I missed one too many instances of forgetting to book a heater service. Melbourne gets plenty cold in winter, but let’s be real – it’s not that cold. Have you been to Northern Europe? Now that is the definition of needing a working heater. I’ve learned that I’m happy to suck it up if it means I don’t have to mess around with annual maintenance, carbon monoxide checks and the like. 

I don’t know… maybe it’s my Viking ancestry, but I’ve never been that big on heating and cooling systems. Melbourne definitely doesn’t get hot enough in summer to require air conditioning; I’m convinced of that. Again, I think the cheese might stand alone there, but what can I say? We’re not exactly in the tropics. It’s actually a very temperate part of the world, relatively speaking. 

It’s true, though, that it is all relative. Friends from Sydney routinely freak out when they experience their first taste of a Melbourne winter, while Tasmanians probably think I’m soft because I own a down coat.

Alright, fair play: freeze rays are a popular method of world domination. When I was drafted into this secret science division I just assumed I’d be the only one who tried to create a giant particle gun that would cause a catastrophic seasonal unbalance that would freeze the entire world forever in the icy grip of an eternal winter.

Then I met my co-workers, and I was soon disabused of that idea. Gerry tried it, Leroy tried it, and Kelsey over there made a massive freeze ray that could freeze entire army platoons into ice blocks with pinpoint accuracy. So yeah…I’m not special. I bet my idea was the best of the lot, though.

Now we’ve all been put in a team working in Brisbane, air conditioning services in that area are the best in the business. It’s sort of like being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the next day you go into work owning a milk bar. At least the air conditioning we have in here is good quality.

We all know that air conditioning hasn’t reached its peak. Give me an average air conditioning unit and I could adjust it so that it uses the same amount of power and also causes a small blizzard in the room, but that’s not what the higher-ups want. No, they’d like us to just improve the current air con technology, make it so that the units are able to maybe clear out some of the dust themselves, and make them more sturdy so that they need fewer repairs. None of that interests me in the slightest, but I’ll play their game, for now. We’ll make air con units so good, every single air conditioning repair company in Brisbane will remove ‘repairs’ from their list of services and just focus on installations! Just see if they can stop us!

It’s a decent enough challenge, for now. And after this…instant freeze drinks.