Hooray for Home Ownership

Week before last, the AC went out.

For those of you not living in Atlanta: this is a crisis of Biblical proportions. Even in April.

I called around, on a Sunday, and A Guy to come out and look at it. He mumbled something about leaks, and about the age of the AC unit, filled it with coolant, charged me $180 and left.

Three days later, the AC was again blowing tepid air.

I called The Company, and very politely Was An Asshole to several layers of ablative management, and eventually convinced them to send another tech out, for free, to perform a real leak detection test.

After an hour or so of crawling around under my house, The Next Guy delivered his report: my AC and furnace were an archaeological treasure. The system is well over thirty years old, and although it is completely dead, it was evidence of Divine Providence that it had lasted this long. It seems the life expectancy of an air-conditioning system is in the range of six weeks, here in the South.

Of course, I find this out after I returned the “Do you want to renew your Home Warranty” form marked as “I would rather be eaten by wild dogs.”

Knowing those scammers, I’m sure that if I’d turned in the claim, they would’ve said something like “We’re sorry. According to your contract, Paragraph 9093, Lline 28, Subsection 32b, you have to get your furnace and AC replaced by the exact same model. Since that model is no longer made, you are required to replace it with ferrets. It’s in the contract. We’ll be over with the ferrets. Soon. ”

So, tomorrow a bunch of scary people will be clambering around under my house, tearing things up, and for this I get to pay about $4000.

I should’ve stuck with the ferrets.