Click Click BOOM!

It's weird moving to a new place with new types of building codes and rooms that are about as old as you are but yet are considered "new construction". This is where I live right now. In a small 500 square foot room that was built about 3 years before I was born, with a strange and scary heating and cooling system, that despite my advanced degree of education I fear I will never quite understand.

This story is really about the night before last, but lets be honest this really started when I moved in. So I'm from Texas right, and maybe if you're not from Texas I should explain that in Texas, from about March until November, we all run the air conditioner....constantly. Read that again CONSTANTLY. There is no break in air condition running for cool nights or breezy mornings, as that would be a foreign concept in Texas.

So being here, being a Texan, and being that my only way to get circulating air is either through an AC unit or through a sliding glass door with my blinds open to the world, I often (like everyday for 24 hours a day for the past month) run the AC. This was until the night before last in question. It was a rather cool night to begin with, and for some reason it just didn't seem like the AC was providing much cool air, so I walked over to the unit, did the cursory handwave in front of the vents ( hello, hello, helloooooooo) and got nothin. Now I don't know really if this is the truth or it just so happen that the lack of air, having very little knowledge of air conditioners themselves, and my generally paranoia, led me to believe that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the motor was perhaps burning out on this little AC unit. So I did what any woman would to - I turned it OFF, because ignoring problems, just makes them either go away or fixes them right? At 11pm on a work night damn straight it does.

Anyway, so the AC was now off. Life was......still happening somewhat normally or so I thought. And then I heard it:

"Click Click"

Hmm strange - did I hear a clicking? Listening intently......

Nothin.

15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour later who knows.....

"Click Click"

Hmm there it is again - I think it's coming from the heater on the floor. So I get down on my hands and knees (don't even say it) and it seemed that this "clicking" noise was coming from the heater (which vaguely I knew had been running ever since I moved in 1 month previously *shrug* hey I dunno refer to the aforementioned ignore problems they will go away section of this post) . So I went over the the thermostat - which was added fairly recently, flipping down the cover I discovered 4 buttons as follows: up arrow, down arrow, func, and prog.

ASIDE: What the hell ever happened to "ON" and "OFF"!!!!

So I start pushing buttons as any annoyed person with no heater knowledge would do. This does not seem to do anything but change the time, and in my quasi-ADD state that I was already in, I did not have a enough patience to stand there and figure out what really needed to be done, besides I thought the pressing of all 4 buttons in a maniacal random order would fix my "click, click" problem. Hey stranger things have been known to happen.

So I walked back over to the bed, as by this time it was now closer to midnight, climbed inside and proceeded to fall asleep. Needless to say the night might as well have been as sleepless as my first night there. The click click continued all night - waking me up every 15, 30, 60(whatever it was) minutes. At 6:30am when I finally reluctantly rolled out of bed I thought perhaps it would have been better to have taken a bat to the 4 button lack of on/off button thermostat.

Apparently the thermostat overhead my thoughts, and had a long discussion with itself with what I can only guess was most of yesterday the last day of September 2004, because when I walked into my room last night I heard nothing of the click click.

Goodbye click click I will not miss you, but you will forever be in the back of my paranoid thoughts.

Click Click