[Creepy thermostat music]
Baby, how hot is my hot water? Hotter than hot. The arrow doesn't lie.
Remember how I hadn't turned on my apartment heat this winter? And how I was feeling pretty good about that? But you know who possibly wasn't feeling good about that? The heat. It took revenge late Friday.
After an all-day meeting and sangria with The Henry/Lehrer Newshour, I got home and fell asleep on the sofa. Half an hour later, I was awake.
Eyes open. Burning rubber. The apartment smelled like burning rubber. And the heat was on. I hadn't turned on heat all winter, yet like scary summer camp, the possessed thermostat had returned for vengance.
If you know what I did last winter, you know I fought and finally killed a possessed thermostat. The box kicked heat on and off mysteriously, and one amazing night wouldn't shut down. Room temperature shot to 90 and started a ridiculous round of opening and closing the windows to the 30 degree temps. The heat was coming… from inside the house.
Like sleepy Ghostbusters, a maintenance guy and I battled the beast for three hours so late that night. The circuit-breaker turned out to be our secret weapon. (… A sleepy Ghostbuster's crossing the streams?)
The fight led to a new thermostat. But it was possessed too, I guess.
In retrospect, it totally looked possessed.
As whatever burned, I went for the circuit-breaker — snap, off. And, in apparently a new annual tradition, I opened the windows to the cold.
The circuit bizarrely also controlled my smoke detector's system, which didn't beep with the power off, like it did for Phoebe. So, good luck. It was 2 a.m. and maybe you were expecting more drama now. I went to bed. I put on my hoodie. The burn smell had passed, and a possessed thermostat at night was a possessed thermostat in the morning.
Slept well, the guys came in the morning, diagnosed a dead heat coil. The strange sounds coming from the heating grate the previous week made sense. In horror style, the end of the heating coil wasn't pretty… and I unknowingly heard it happen! Putting the Poe in Home Depot.
Anyway, the best part was the maintenance guys opening all kinds of secret doors and panels in my apartment. The end of Rosemary's Baby, it wasn't, but I love that stuff. Secret doors, not horror movies. I don't even like horror movies. Why did I write this whole post that way?
A secret door.
A secret panel.
A secret dirty message.
The crew came back yesterday and put in a new coil and thermostat. I never saw them taking the old ones away, but I'm sure they did good work. Everything will be okay now. That's how these things end, right?
January 30th, 2012 at 11:07 PM
[...] a few nights this winter. There has been no need for NYT-described extremes, and there have been no zombie heat moments. But there's another month or two of winter yet to come. My hot chocolate's [...]