I went up to the assisted living community today to fill out forms so I can be cleared to go in there as a health care professional. (It seems there are a lot of retired high ranking military and someone that used to work for Reagan when he was president living in there. No wonder they’re hot on clearance.) At any rate, I put my ‘Be Back By…’ sign up, and went out to do this. I was gone maybe 30 minutes. When I got back, I had a surprise.
I unlocked the door and went into the shop. I was greeted with some smoke and a burning smell, an electrical burning smell. I immediately ran around trying to find out what it could be. It was not in the back room (my work area). I started turning things off. I hit switches on power strips turning off the refrigerator and water cooler, the fountains and lava lamps, and I turned off the air conditioning system. Then I ran over to my landlord’s office and got her over there to help locate the problem.
We looked at all the devices I had running, and they were all cool to the touch, telling us that they weren’t the ones causing the problem. The smell lingered around the computer, but since I had gone directly to my landlord’s office this morning to help with a computer problem, and had gotten the call to go fill out forms while there, I hadn’t taken the time to turn on the shop computer. I checked the battery backup unit, and it wasn’t warm.
So, my landlord went back to her office, and I started switching things back on. Within a few minutes, I could smell the burning again. Standing under one of the vents, could smell it the strongest. This told me that it was coming from the air conditioning system. I shut it back off, and got the landlord again. She then called the repair company, but didn’t know how long it would take before someone could come out.
Seeing as it was noon already, I called my one scheduled client and cancelled his 2:00 session. I hated to do this, and thankfully (at least in this case), he was the only one scheduled. (Each week I say that if I get five clients, I will make expenses. The one I cancelled today would have been number five.) Even though the back room has its own air system (which also cools part of my landlord’s office thanks to the way the building has been cobbled up over the years), I didn’t want to be in a session with a repair person climbing around in the ceiling banging on things. That would not make for a peaceful massage.
The repair person got there at 1:30, and after a while figured out that the blower motor was burning up. It’s a good thing that this had not happened during the night. If it had, there might not be a building left to come back to. Wow. We can all be humbled by little things that we normally don’t think about that are beyond our control.
As it was, I spent the rest of the day either in the heat working on the computer, in the back room cooling off, or over in my landlord’s office where it was nice and cold. By 4:00, the system was fixed, and the temperature inside was near 84˚ (as it was 93˚ outside). At that point, I simply went home.
Talk about a wasted day. The sad part is that I have a lot of wasted days where I don’t have anyone to work on. This was one day that I did have someone scheduled, and I had to cancel them.