Well, yesterday’s post went all to hell. I wrote a paragraph or two, but it was so damn hot in my house that I was no longer able to take it. It was around six when I asked my wife to provide transportation to the nearest Home Depot so that I could buy a new pad for our evaporative cooler. We have a MasterCool cooler in our home, and it works pretty well. It can normally keep the interior temperature thirty degrees colder than the exterior while providing a nice breeze. The MasterCool is a lower maintenance system than your average evaporative cooler as it only has one pad (as opposed to the eight on the ones at work) and can be easily cleaned/repaired by a layman. The major problem with the cooler is that the cost of that pad was $97 yesterday, and at least that high the rest of the days of the year (even higher if you are not at the home depot), while the “aspen” pads for normal evap. coolers are usually a couple of bucks each. 97 is a larger number than say 12 (which is what the cost of the 4 pads would be if I had a similar size cooler that was not a MasterCool.)
The MasterCool system does certainly work a hell of a lot better, but the difference in prices is pretty considerable. MasterCool does offer a five year warranty on their pads, but that warranty does not cover damage due to water, calcium, lime, hell anything that the pad might be damaged by. I guess they are saying that if you leave the box on the shelf in your shed for five years it will still perform as if you bought it new, since the warranty doesn’t cover any of the things that could actually happen to the pad if it was in use.
I have always likened the warranty on the MasterCool pads to the people who sell stuff on eBay with a “guaranteed not to be Dead On Arrival” guarantee. So the second that you touch the thing you broke it. If you say “but it never booted.” They will say, “it powered up, didn’t it?” If you try to say that you really don’t know, but a light came on, that means that it did power on and therefore you broke it…
To use the same logic, I have a PC that totally works, it will boot right up and run without any problems. Well the fact that it has a boot-sector virus and can not actually do anything might be mis-interpreted by some as a problem, but I can certainly guarantee that it will start when you push the button…
• *sigh* . I had a direction that I was travelling here, with my thoughts, but instead of that happening I totally lost that track after having been on the phone with my wife until the very second she walked in the door after work. Good, bad, indifferent, whatever thought I lost is just that, lost. Not that I write anything that could end world hunger over here anyway, just that I sure needed something other than a *sigh* to signal the formation of a new thought.
• Lollipops and Pentagrams, if one could combine the two they would be quite a wealthy person.