My Day In: Air Conditioning

04:40 AM
I wake up at with a comprehensive motherfucker of a sore throat because the air con always dries me out like I've been French kissing a sponge. After a few seconds of staring into the dark, I realise that reason I'm awake is because the fan has popped back on, making a loud "CLick" noise, it does this every fifteen minutes or so. Most times I'm able to ignore it but every sixth or seventh time it builds to a crescendo of sudden scary night noising, one of those "CLICK"'s makes me sit up in bed grasping for the light switch as I ready myself for the mortal struggle with the house sized cricket who seems to be trying to eat me. Of course I could just sleep without the air con on, but I have this thing about having to wash gallons of sweat out of my one set of sheets three times every day because my washing machine doesn't work very well. So, instead, I sleep badly and have a sore throat, it seems like a fair trade.

09:00 AM
Phone goes of and then goes back to sleep so that I can too. Room is freezing, yet somehow I am still sweating. Pull covers over half of me as compromise. Uncovered half now far too cold whilst covered half far too hot.

09:10 AM
Snooze mode # 1 kicks in, switch covered/uncovered sides. For brief moment am comfortable enough to escape back to sleep.

09:20 AM
Snooze mode # 2 kicks in, merely a transititory stage, perhaps change sides/hug pillow. On occasion if I'm feeling active I might turn off the air con and open my door a little at this point so that I can enjoy the next half an hour of cool air mixing with the war form the living room.

09:30 AM
Snooze mode # 3 kicks in and is ignored as I sleep. Room is pleasantly temperatured if I opened the door, or freezing if I didn't.

09:40 AM
Snooze mode # 4 kicks in , I debate whether to get up and instead go back to sleep. Throat is beginning to smart.

09:50 AM
Snooze Mode # 5 kicks in. I usually get up about now as I have to be in work for ten. I go out into the sweltering furnace of the living room, take a three minute shower, brush my teeth get dressed and am out the door and at my desk by 10:05 AM.

10:05 AM
Sitting at the desk, the office is freezing if one of the Chinese staff has had to walk to work, or pleasant enough if they didn't. The problem with Air con is that most people only really think about it when they're either too hot or too cold. So they end up turning it on or off and you have to just put up with the adjustment to your ambient temperature, you just have to take it.
It's not like you can for example, stand up and bellow in their face " Hey! Fuckwad! I realise you may be overly hot but for Christ's sake why don't you stand in the corridor where the building AC makes it Sub Artic for five minutes instead of making me sit here with goosebumps for the next twenty until I finally awkwardly ask if you mid if I turn the AC down a bit?" You can't do it cause your throat is far too sore.

12:30 PM
Lunch time means going outside, outside means a variety of ambient temperatures ranging from teeth chattering to sweltering. I walk from the relatively comfortable office, into the Artic wasteland of the corridor. I actually have a jacket that I wear just for when I'm standing in the corridor, it's that cold. Someone once told me that apparently in New York, more people die of pneumonia in the Summer than the Winter because they just live in the vast extremes of Outside Hot and Inside Cold. I can believe it. I tell that story at least once a week. I find it comforting in a "Generation X'er continuous appreciation of the vague sarcastic irony of our existence" kind of way.
Going outside right now is actually okay, it's like a really warm day in a temperate country, but coupled with massive humidity and even worse pollution it ain't doing your sore throat any favours. The Air conditioning units of Hong Kong are the single biggest drain on the power grid, massively outclassing their nearest rival. This also means they're the main contributors to the worsening pollution problem here. It's funny, in other places I would feel genuinely bad to be adding to this problem, here I don't even think about it as I reach for the AC. It's just too fucking hot.

In terms of AC, Walking through places in Hong Kong is a bit of an international tableau of differing climates. People here have actually figured out a way to make the kind of AC you subscribe to be a kind of social stratification. For example to many Hong Kong Chinese people, temperatures just short of freezing are the only acceptable standard, whilst Europeans with their added layers of fat prefer a more temperate option. So if you go into a Hong Kong Chinese business here and they favour a temperate AC, you can immediately tell that they're trying to cater to the Europeans, and vice versa. It's an odd little thing.

Also, to a certain extent climate control is another form of wealth classification, since more expensive air con units run into hundreds of thousands of HK Dollars, if you only have one of the window boxes {as I have had since I moved out of the Sykes's} you're doomed to half-measured air con. So if you have da money you can be comfy, tis as simple as that. The theft of air conditioning units from apartments here is apparently pretty massive, an interesting fact if you throw in the "bling" factor of having good air conditioning in your flat. Some people actually refer to each other's Air con units by model name. "Hey Yao lets go back to yours and crank up that sweet AC-1050 Beeatch!" "Fan, your Zannusi 55k is tricked out Muthafucka!"

17:00 PM
Been sitting at desk all day, throat even worse, feel like germs have spore colonies in the spongy air con filters and are busily invading my body. I have never had so many colds and flus in my life. It's like uin the office we all have one glass that we all drink out of, except every time we do it's always the backwashed bit at the end that's thirty percent spit.
I sneeze, everyone else here immeditaely covers their mouths. If someone coughs, I immediatelty cover mine. Germs and air con go hand in hand, the little buggers just love to get into the filters and go mental. Because it's all recirculated air, you get this weird stale smell, a kind of "diet-smell" of everything. For example if someone’s having a smoke, you get a kind of "Fresh-air Smoke" smell all over the place. When we get food in, you can smell the tinge of it everywhere. Because the air is cold, you're constantly taking deep breaths, I have yet to see a place where it's so cold you can see your breath, even though it's definitely been cold enough for that to happen. as far as I can figure that's largely because air conditioned air doesn't conduct vapour the same way as normal air, presumably because it's so devoid of moisture or some such other pertinent scientific fact.
I'm looking forward to going home, usually at around 18:30 PM, so that I can go and regulate my own air con and stop putting my jacket on and off every twenty minutes. Living in air conditioning is pretty much all about the five minutes after you've taken off an article of clothing or walked inside from the heat. All the other times, it's pretty shitty.

02:00 AM
I turn on the AC in my bedroom before taking a shower, the room has to be cool before I go to bed, it's just a pain in the ass trying to sleep otherwise. It begins to "CLick" as I leave the room. I hate that "CLick". More than I hate Osama Bin Laden, at least he lets me sleep.