I can’t work my thermostat
I had to get a new furnace last year and at the same time, they installed a new thermostat. I got the installer to show me how to program it. I couldn’t understand it, so I asked him again. He was very patient, and I still didn’t understand and finally decided I’d figure it out later because I was certain he would take both the furnace and the thermostat away with him if he realized just how stupid I was. “Sure, I’ve got it,” were my last words as he headed out the door.
I did not have it.
I still don’t have it.
I’ve always liked a programmable thermostat. When the boys were teenagers, they’d stay up all night and complain the house was too cold. That was a chance for me to regale them with tales of how we grew up, seeing our breath as we sat in the living room and having the water beside our beds form an icy covering overnight. There was absolutely no situation that my father hadn’t suffered through in more dire straits than his children. He had survived both hotter and colder temperatures, walked farther, waited longer, been sicker, eaten bread you could sharpen a knife on and carved mould off things he’d eaten and not only lived but been lucky to have it.
While there was much truth in most of what he claimed, I never understood why I had to suffer if he’d already done so. I didn’t have to be too cold or too hot or eat bread that hurt my teeth. It was like a small piece of the Saskatchewan prairie was lurking in our home, waiting for a little girl to complain just once too often. This included my father patrolling the thermostat like a prison guard on yard duty.
The dinner dishes would barely be cleared and he’d stroll over to the thermostat and dump it down to 63F degrees. This was tumbling it
from its epic height of 69 F degrees. It was like he was scared if we took it over 70 the house would blow up. We had a fireplace and a wood stove but if you wanted to get close to one of them, you had to push my father and the cat out of the way first.
Dad would go to bed early, we’d wait an hour, then Mom would push the temperature back up. When he was on the afternoon shift, we would go crazy and hit 72 degrees, sometimes. We were wild. And we also had to remember to put it back down or there would be hell to pay. When I moved back here in 1996, I declared I would never freeze in the dark again. I discovered the difference in the heating bill was about five bucks a month at the time. I’d spent a childhood wearing more layers than an onion made of wool — for five bucks.
A programmable thermostat I put in back then ended the games, though I left it in Fahrenheit to compare it to my father’s Arctic tendencies. After the boys moved out, they told me they used to crank it up when I went to bed.
I keep the new one in Celsius, but my inability to read a manual or understand multiple YouTube demonstrations means I manually drop it to 16 C at night and race down in the morning to crank it up to 20 as the cats shiver and stay under the covers until the house warms up. Deciding to take another run at setting the thing, I finally looked up the temperature conversions the other day because I’d just been ballparking it in my head.
I’ve been keeping the place colder than my father ever did.