It was as simple as this. On Saturday evening, at 7:30 pm, I noticed that the air coming from the vents in the house was not cool. Checking outside, I found that my compressor was not working. Browsing through the yellow pages, my wife located and called an air conditioning repairman, and put me on the phone. He did a brief Q&A with me, and determined that he was indeed needed. Soon, Mr. Dillon arrived. I talked to him and watched him work in the dark of my backyard. After replacing the 9-yr-old capacitor, we went inside to enjoy the air conditioning and some water while he wrote out the bill and I wrote out a check. By then, it was about 9:30 pm.
Nothing in particular is especially miraculous about this story, to those who live in this culture, economy, and time of ours. But in the wider context of human experience, there are many layers of amazing facts in this story: I have air conditioning. I have central air conditioning. I can call a man on Saturday night at 7:30 pm to repair it. He shows up and cheerfully completes the repair within 2 hours. The repair costs me the equivalent of about 4 hours of my work. Wow.
