Baby, it's cold out there

The air conditioner in my bedroom broke again. It broke a couple months ago, blowing non-cooled air, and after some mishaps somebody came by and refilled the coolant. Last time I had an odd little sequence of making appointments, finding no one responding to them, and getting someone out quickly anyway. Today was less confusing; I went in to the maintenance office in the morning, they told me someone would be by at 2:30, and someone came at 3:00, which gave me time to wash my dishes.

I was curious whether there was something wrong that the air conditioner needed to be recharged twice in a couple months. But all I was able to establish with the repair guy was that yeah, I could call on the maintenance office every couple months and get it recharged, so I didn't need to worry about it. If it weren't for that two-year stretch of uninterrupted service before I wouldn't mind the recharges so much, but I'm also curious why the bedroom unit broke when the study unit -- which gets the second-most usage -- hasn't either. The guest bedroom air conditioner is perfect, but then I'd go years without knowing if it did break.

Other miscellaneous and apparently arbitrary maintenance issues: building maintenance will replace the shower mount which wore down so that the shower head makes it fall down. But it won't replace the shower head that leaks. I don't know what the philosophical difference here is.

Trivia: François Viète, 1540-1603, found 23 of the roots of a 45-th degree polynomial given him in a challenge. He would have been able to find all 45 had he used negative numbers. Source: The Development of Mathematics, E T Bell.

Currently Reading: Tudor Historical Thought, F J Levy.