Off the Cuff: Cool is as cool does

The hot news in my house is that I am cool. Not cool personally, of course, because my wife and our two daughters have said for years that I am the most uncool man in America. I am cool physically because I have just sweated the big stuff by installing an air conditioner in our bedroom window.

When my wife and I were looking for a house a few years ago, we were shown some of the most pathetic dumps east of the Mississippi, including one place that had no panels in the front door. Soon thereafter we found another real estate agent and bought a house that has panels in the front door but, alas, no central air-conditioning. After suffering through some long, hot summers, my wife insisted I do something about the situation or she was going to give me the cold shoulder. So I broke down (due to overheating) and bought an air conditioner.

It is supposed to cool off the entire upstairs, but because the upstairs is too big to cool off with just one air conditioner, my wife really wants central air-conditioning, which costs thousands of dollars and is installed by professionals. An air conditioner costs considerably less but weighs approximately as much as a baby grand piano and has to be lugged upstairs and installed in the bedroom window by someone who not only isn't a professional, but hasn't the faintest idea what the hell he is doing.

That person would be me. And speaking of fainting, I almost did. That's because it was unbearably hot upstairs. You might think this was due to the scientific principle that heat rises.

Not true. Heat doesn't rise. It just follows you around if you have to do some onerous household project. I could have worked in air-conditioned comfort if only the air conditioner had been installed, but I couldn't until I had installed the air conditioner.

This is known as a Catch-22: If I didn't catch the air conditioner as it started to slide out the window, it would have fallen 22 feet to the ground below. And it may yet do so, but it will fall when I am under the window and land on the head, with the tragic result that the air conditioner will be ruined and I will have to install a new one.

I started out with two tools: a screwdriver (we were out of orange juice, so I had the vodka straight) and, I am on the level about this, a level. I had to use the latter instrument to make sure the air conditioner was tilting towards the outside at just enough of an angle so water wouldn't drip into the bedroom but not so much that the chilling scenario envisioned above would come true.

First, though, I had to get the air conditioner out of the box; attach a couple of doohickeys to the bottom; hoist it into the open window without rupturing a vital organ; screw the accordion shutters to the window frame; cut and nail a piece of wood to the windowsill because otherwise the air conditioner would have crashed to the floor; stuff strips of foam rubber into any cracks to keep the bugs from getting in and eating me alive while I sleep, and read an instruction manual that must have been written by Nasa to figure out how to programme the stupid thing. This was the most difficult part of all because I neglected to follow Step 1 ("Plug it in").

My wife likes the air conditioner so much that she wants me to buy another one and put it in my office window so the rest of the upstairs can be cooled off. At this point, I am ready to get central air-conditioning. To save thousands of dollars, I'll take the panels out of the front door.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service