I have it on good authority…

that I’m a dumbass. In the immortal words of “That 70’s Show”:

Eric: I don’t know. You know, it seems like bad things are always happening to me, like I have bad luck or something.
Red: [slowly] Son, you don’t have bad luck. The reason that bad things happen to you is because you’re a dumbass.

It all started when, after Blair and Shari started coming down with pretty bad headaches, I checked both of the air conditioners and found black mold in both. I searched The Wizard of the current day (AKA “The Interwebs”) and found a bunch of treatments for cleaning up black mold in air conditioners including bleach. However, since our AC isn’t exactly easy to open (nary impossible), I tried one of the other methods – Lysol spray. Spray thoroughly where you can, then turn on the fan for a second. Turn it off and spray as the fan blades spin to a stop (this prevents it from spraying back in your face but allows you to spray the whole thing).

That seemed to work pretty well, but there was one other thing that I read that had stuck with me. It said that the black mold usually formed where pools of water formed in the tray of the AC. Lo and behold, there was a ton of water there that wasn’t draining and had black mold in it. I had sprayed it as well, but wanted to do as instructed to ‘get the water out of there so it couldn’t spread’. *DING* bad idea #1, although I hadn’t acted on it yet.

So, after forgetting my meds yesterday (and struggling through a day where I was really, really tired), I came home and we went out for some food. When we noticed the air conditioner, I remembered that I was going to drill a hole to drain the extra water out. So, I grabbed a drill and started to try to drill a hole in the pan from below. Now, I should have taken the difficulty in getting to a spot where I wouldn’t hit the compressor as a sign, but nah – I didn’t do that. I kept going even though I hadn’t turned off the air conditioner – *DING* bad idea #2. And lo & behold, as soon as I made my way through the pan, the drill bit and the fan blade connected in a horribly unpleasant manner – and I now had a broken fan blade.

SO, I went down to figure out how to fix the fan blade, and that’s when I learned that there NEEDS to be water in the pan because the suction of the fan blade pulls a little water from the pan to cool the compressor – which was really evident immediately as the compressor got very hot very quickly without the fan blade. Damn. Now I needed a repair shop because I couldn’t repair the fan myself.

Fast forward to yesterday morning. I called the suggested repair shop, and found out that repairs would take 3-4 days and cost at least $150. Well, with the heat wave we are having this week, that was simply not an option. So, instead I had to run out and buy a new AC (I’m hoping to fix the other one as a backup). By this time, it was already 9:30 and I was late to work, but we needed the AC so off I went.

I picked up one that had been rated 5-stars everywhere I looked and brought it home. To find out it wasn’t a simple plug-and-play AC … oh no, I had to build the cabinet for it, install the cabinet into the window, level the AC, etc. etc. The whole process took me almost an hour-and-a-half in the heat, and caused me to miss a meeting – all because … I’m a dumbass and a) didn’t think to look a little closer about the water in the pan and b) didn’t think to turn off the AC (and fan) before drilling into it.

As an extra karmic kick-in-the-ass, it turns out that something is wrong with this AC (it rattles something awful when the cover is put on), so I need to take it out and return it. But that will have to wait until I’ve thought everything through – I’ve already made enough half-witted mistakes this week.