Every restaurant I’ve been in is freezing and uncomfortable.
I went to a hockey game at the St. Pete Times Forum and froze my ass off the entire game.
Back in Ontario we’re asked to use some common sense in the summer time regarding thermostat settings. That means setting it to about 72 to 74 Farenheight, which is entirely comfortable.
Personally, I don’t have air conditioning at home - seems superfluous for maybe a dozen days a year when it would be beneficial.
What’s up in Florida? I’m colder than I would be at home. I can’t imagine a restaurant staying in business if 62F was as warm as it got in the winter. So why is 62F a reasonable temperature for A/C in FLA?
Think that’s bad? Every building in the college I attended insisted on having the temperatures that low, so assuming you’re part of the 95% of people there who have to go outside at some point (or, say, 4 or 5 points a day), it’s going to feel a hell of a lot more hot than it actually is, and god help you if you forget to bring a sweater to class.
The hockey rink kind of has to be cold, you see they have this big sheet of ice…
Since you started this - Hey Vegas! It’s a fucking desert, stop with the fountains! Those guys downstream that are trying to grow food? Yeah, they could use some of that stuff.
Well, bull crap of course. The refrigerant is under the ice surface. We have rafter-mounted heaters for the crowds at our rinks in Canada. I could have used some tonight (err, last night at this point - technically.)
Back in Ontario, I can’t remember being in anyone’s home where they had central air conditioning. It’s just not necessary there. Down here, it’s necessary, and I’ve not been anywhere that didn’t have it. 62 degrees is ridiculous, though.
It seems to be the problem with buildings cooled by a huge, industrial AC unit, controlled from a remote location. In the building where I work, it gets so cold sometimes, my fingers get numb and I have to go outside and sun myself on a rock, like a lizard. The thermostat for the entire building is six miles away. If they turn it down to 55 to keep the millions of dollars’ worth of electronic equipment cool, the office and studio blocks are freezing. And do you know what their idea of heat in the winter is? Less air conditioning.
Then to a shared 1B, where the power bill got cut down to 1/10 of what it had been. The reason? I never had the A/C on with windows or the door open, only set it to “full blast” for a few minutes and if I was on fire after walking for half a shadow-less mile, switched it off before leaving the house.
Later I was on my own apartment and I had the lowest bill in the building by far. My friends didn’t believe my power bill, claimed the previous owners of the aparment must have twiddled the meter… noooo, I just don’t set the thing to try and freeze the air outside!
The first places in Spain to get A/C were five-star hotels, then banks, later movie theaters. Now many houses are being built with “heat pumps” (which double as heating and A/C) instead of just heating; people from beach areas are happy because for the first time in their lives… they can heat the house in the winter without having to buy a store’s worth of electric heaters!
At first businesses would have the A/C on at full blast because, you know, we want to show it off. Customers would complain it was too cold; if the employees opened the door to let the hot air in, the customers would complain louder: “it’s still too bloody cold and now I’m in a current! And it’s a waste of electricity! I don’t want you to use my commisions to throw money away on my next cold!” (savings banks in Spain are owned by local governments, which makes them sort of customer-owned).
It didn’t take business chains long to realize that if two movie theaters were showing the same movie, the one where the A/C wasn’t set to “freeze” got more customers. So now it’s unusual to enter a business and say “yow! Give me a minute to get my furs out, you’ve got this place set to make ice cream or what?”
Back when dirt was still under warranty and I was just a kid in Texas, I never, ever attended an air conditioned school; not even in college. I didn’t live in a house with central air until I was twenty-two or thereabouts although my parents did own a house that had a single room equipped with a window unit. My grandfather’s house had a swamp cooler–that was a real innovation in its time. Movie houses started advertising air conditioning when I was a teenager. I was twenty-three before I bought a car that had air conditioning. I think I started to sweat the day I was born and I continued to sweat, for the most part, until I fled Texas when I was twenty-three.
Don’t complain about air conditioning until you’ve lived in a very hot place without it.
That makes Spaniards perfectly qualified to complain. Want a botijo? Very traditional, cools water. We can also offer you a porrón, for your alcoholic beverages; the reason it’s got a sleeve is so you can pour botijo-cooled water on the sleeve to keep the beverages from heating up as fast as they’d like to. And here, have some insulating walls.
Mind if I use your line about dirt being under warranty?
When I was growing up in Tulsa, for the longest time, we didn’t have an air conditioner. My best friend who lived down the street had a huge window unit that cooled the whole house, classy family that they were. When it got really hot outside (100+ degrees), then we’d occasionally go inside for a bit, but were really too restless to stay inside for too long.
Since I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, we’ve obtained a small window unit that we have in the guest room and will occassionally use it when it gets too warm at nights in the summer, but those nights are rare. In the summer usually we just use window fans at night and close up the house during the day so it stays a relatively cool 72-76 degrees.
I work in an office building in North Florida. Temperatures outside are supposed to get to eighty today. I am currently wearing thermal underwear beneath my suit, and keep an assortment of sweaters in a drawer. However, I’m not really bitching. I’ve lived in Florida all my life and still haven’t become acclimated to the heat.
Central Air-what? Cental What-Conditioning? Central What-What?
Having grown up in the South Island of New Zealand, I don’t recall anyone having central air con, except office buildings.
I didn’t even have a car with air conditioning in it until I moved to Australia. After all, when you have to contend with a New Zealand Winter (which involves rather a lot of snow), Air Conditioning is somewhat of a folly for 9 months of the year, and on the three or four days a year it gets hot, you can wind the windows down.
Of course, in Queensland- where it’s always summer, or at least Not Winter- Air Conditioning is a necessity unless you enjoy being bathed in your own sweat for 11 months of the year…
Just like every other day of the year, I’m in my office wearing my cruddy long black sweater that I call my “robe” over my clothes, since the temp on the heat in the winter is set too low for my comfort, as is the AC in summer.
I was in a restaurant last week called the Texas Steak House where I wasn’t the only patron freezing their ass off. Someone finally asked the waitress to see what she could do and she said the temp (in the low 60’s) is “set at the corporate office”. What kind of bogus shite is that?
Temperature in public places is one of my pet peeves. I don’t know why people feel the need to go to extreme temperatures. 71 degrees, thank you. All year, all the time. Why would you need it colder in the summer than you’d have it in the winter?
Next time, I’m marrying a chilly woman. My husband and I do NOT see eye-to-eye on temperature. And I don’t think I know a single couple who DOES agree on temperature. It’s all a cruel joke.
I don’t know what’s up with the A/C. I don’t like it either. I’ve actually managed to get by without A/C in my home and car for several years now. I did suffer heat exhaustion once when I made the mistake of going downtown in stop and stop traffic in the middle of the afternoon. I have a new car with A/C now but I don’t set it to freezing. I have to take a long sleeve shirt or sweater with me whenever I go out to a movie or restaurant. I remember my college keeping things really cold and everyone always complaining but nothing getting changed. A long sleeve shirt or sweater wasn’t enough, you needed a coat. There’s nothing more annoying to have to lug a coat with you to wear inside a building in the summer. One time someone was commenting on the windows being fogged up because it was so cold inside, I pointed out that it wasn’t fogged up … that was frost.
At my work we had to put lockboxes on the thermostats because of a certain staff member who kept setting the A/C below 70, probably because she was having hot flashes. The other staff would be walking around with blankets over their shoulders. Despite constantly being told that the A/C unit couldn’t handle it and causing it to freeze up several times (because when it’s not cooling you have to crank it lower :rolleyes: ) the main A/C unit eventually died. When we remodeled we had to add a 3rd unit, it stays quite cool but I still come in to find the A/C units below 70. For the record most everyone else at the clinic feel 70 is too cold, except for the eskimo* who insists on killing our A/C units.
*Eskimo is not meant to be derogatory, it’s just meant to keep me from using other colorful terms.
Help yourself. Is a botijo anything like a swamp cooler? Or is is the cloth covering for clay jars; one wets the cloth and evaporation cools the jar’s contents?
The botijo is a specially-shaped unglazed clay jar. It’s (usually) almost round, with a handle, a funnel-shaped hole that’s large enough to pour water in and a very pointed nipple you drink from (you don’t touch the nipple, you pour from it into your mouth - the trick to avoid choking is to make sure you’re poiting at your tongue and not your tonsils). Water is cooled because of capilarization drawing it out to the surface, where it evaporates, absorbing heat from the “bulk water” in the container. The nipples of a waterskin and of a botijo are pretty much the same shape.
The porrón is glass. It has a long funnel (used to pour beer or wine in and as the handle) and a long conical spout with a tiny hole at the end. You can pour from the porrón to a glass but the traditional usage is same as the botijo, pouring directly into your mouth. I remember a documentary about ten years ago that indicated porrones as one of our biggest exports to China (the other two top items at the time were Chupachups candy and buttons).
My office is always wayyyy too cool, too. But I don’t want to live without a/c in my house or car. I don’t set it that cool at home, though, except I like to sleep really cool at night.