It ain’t fair

Lucky me, I got to work the booth at the Howard County Fair today.  I say I’m lucky because I’ve only got to work here one day here instead of the 2-3 days I worked it last year.  Another plus is that this year the vendor pavilion we’re in is newly air-conditioned as opposed to last years’ sweat fest.

 

Speaking of air-conditioning, a couple of weeks ago when I arrive for work at our Baltimore store I noticed that one of our two air conditioners was missing.  It was the unit that hasn’t worked all this year and we’ve been too poor to replace so I didn’t give it too much thought.  I hoped that maybe things were looking up and it had been sent out for repair.  Shortly after, we all discovered the real truth which is that someone(s) had descended under the cover of night and stolen it.

Once the police reports were filed and the insurance agents were called, my boss put in a call to a company that does fencing to get a quote on getting the working unit secured.  The morning that the fencing contractor was due to come out, I got to work to find a second hole where the working air-conditioner once stood.    BALLS!  That is only one of the places that were destined to become uncomfortably sweaty over the next few weeks.

The cows were out of the barn and the door was left wide open and the occupants left inside were fast becoming Sweat lab instead of Techlab and getting crankier by the day. The outdoor temperatures climbed to triple digits which is not uncommon in these parts at this time of year.  Even without the skyrocketing temperatures outside, we have no way of fighting the heat that is generated by all the computers and processing equipment inside the lab.

One thing that made one hour film processing possible back in the 1980s was the availability of chemistry and minilab equipment that work at high temperatures which speeds the processing time of the film.  The down side of that is the machines are heating the chemistry to 100 degrees and now we have no way to counteract it.  We now have the problem of the machines running too hot and shutting down on their own.

All this is not my problem for the time being.  I’m at the fair until 8:00 pm and then I’m on vacation for the next week or so.  My hope is that the insurance companies will have worked out who will pay for what by the time I return and new frigid air will be in my future.  As it stands now, the boss’s insurance says it’s the landlord’s problem but the landlord has the opposite opinion.  If this can’t be worked out this may be the last nail in the Techlab coffin.   No one wants to shop in a place without AC and I know I speak for more than just myself when I say that no one wants to work in these conditions.