What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

The air, the condition, and the conditioner
Getting a brand new apartment in the possibly the quietest part of town made me assume that I had the equivalent of a first row center seat in a Broadway theater. Well like any other theater seat this one had its own set of surprises. First of all everything seemed further than I thought. Union Square was blocks and blocks away, my gym was a good 30 minutes walk and getting to the nearest subway stop was at least 10 minutes. So far the seat is broken and I am wedged between a fat lady and a bodybuilder -- both are overflowing into my seat from the armrest up.

The apartment at least on the inside was amazing. Granite counters in the kitchen, all new appliances, newly stripped and finished floors, new fixtures, new bathroom tile, new new new, even new air-conditioning units. I was thrilled. Except after a few nights of unusually light sleep I was starting to wonder why this apartment of wonder was not the dream cradle I hoped it would be. I soon traced the problem to this strange humming slash rattling noise that was in my bedroom. The noise was coming from the really powerful GE brand air-conditioner window unit. The fan noise sounded normal but when the compressor kicked in it felt like I was sleeping in a factory instead of what I thought to be a quiet apartment in East Village.

So slowly and surely this incessant noise drove me insane. First I tried to sleep in the summer heat without any A/C only to wake up 4 hours later in soaking sheets and a real bad temper. Then I got into to the art of jiggling the A/C unit. It seemed that if you pushed it around in its frame a certain way, the noise would stop. But of course the noise eventually came back like a high school bully haunting me for the rest of my life. As overdramatic as this all sounds, believe me when you're sleep deprived and have to get up at 6:30 am to get to work at 9am, things seem a lot more depressing.

I felt so defeated. I felt betrayed. The A/C unit, my only support system in the humid heat of New York was also depriving me of the sleep I needed so bad. It fit the pattern. Even my relationship with my A/C unit was a dysfunctional one. Lovely, I thought.

After I gave up with wrestling with the A/C unit night after night for a week or two, I called the management office and told them my A/C needed service. Deep down I knew they would come out, check the unit out and tell me that the noise was normal but hey I had to do something. Surely enough, a crew was sent. First of all they did not even hear the noise I was talking about. It was almost magical, the noise seemed to appear only at night and only I seemed to hear it. Am I already going insane I thought?

Finally after two visits I was told that this unit is a little noisier than others out in the market but this unit is brand new and that they're not planning to change it. So I was told pretty much to shut up or move out. It had been just three weeks since I moved in, and the New York Gods were already screwing me.

A few days later I noticed something. The noise was not so bad when I was up and about during the day. This was either because I was not paying attention to it or something else was going on. It turned out, because my bed was putting my head closer to the corner opposite the one the A/C was on, somehow the noise was getting magnified in the particular spot I was trying to sleep at.

The solution however crass in terms of the feng shui of the room was a home run. I moved the bed to the opposite side of the room and the noise was almost completely gone. So that's the thing about life and life in New York City. Sometimes you run into problems you would rarely run anywhere else, and you try all of the tried and true solutions only to realize that the only way to bend the spoon is to well bend it with your own two hands.