I returned to the Jiffy Lube from Friday, although I did on the way in start to worry about what if the air conditioning wasn't really spoiled after all and somehow the problems Friday had been a weird transient glitch. I realize this is implausible, but I am hardly one to let mere plausibility stop my compulsions. So despite it being a cold and occasionally heavy-raining day, I was puttering along with the air conditioner set to maximum and blasting the air while trying to reason whether this was really just the natural chill of the air or whether it was the air conditioner going. But really, I knew.
When I pulled in again, remarkably, the guy working the front office recognized me, and asked what was up. He's a very genial guy, the sort of person who smiles and calls you chief, and while I am painfully shy this is the sort of lightly genial tone that makes it possible for me to actually communicate. He was shocked at the air conditioning ran out in about fifteen minutes and asked if it was a leak. That's what I hoped to find out. He said to pull around and they'd see what they could see.
In the time it took me to go around, though, he communicated with the manager and determined that they couldn't do the sort of diagnosis this would require. I should go to an air conditioning specialist and find what was wrong, and if it was anything they'd done they'd reimburse me. I suppose that's about as good as I could hope for, given the circumstances of the case. (I imagine it's unlikely they had anything to do with it.) I did ask their recommendation for an air conditioning service, and he recommended one which he said was just up the road on the left. I did follow that way back to what I thought was my road to get back on my normal commute, although I missed the place, and I got on the wrong road so I launched myself back several exits into what had become rush-hour traffic. I suppose that happens too.
Trivia: Stuart Cramer coined the term ``air conditioning'' in 1905 to describe what the machinery he was installing would do for air in a southern textile factory: it would control its temperature, humidity, volume, and recirculation. The emphasis was on humidity reduction rather than cooling. Source: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman. (And I'm oddly disturbed to discover I don't have more books covering generally the history of refrigeration.)
Currently Reading: Ford: The Men And The Machine, Robert Lacey.