The Slow Breaks

There are a lot of crappy things about being poor, but one of them is how the little things that get neglected can become these occasional (to constant) annoyances in your life. You wear shoes until they are absolutely falling apart, which means that for a while, you wear crappy shoes that are in the process of falling apart. It's not bad enough to justify buying new shows, but it's also not fun.

Actually, in most cases, this is usually what happens. Something starts the process of falling apart of malfunctioning, but it doesn't just outright break. When you're poor (and trying to be frugal), you tend not to fix something until it's totally broken.

The heating/cooling system in  the van is a good example of this. The AC works OKAY. It doesn't cool well, but it cools just enough to take the edge off of the hellish heat we get during the summer. Except, of course, when it's REALLY hot. Then it doesn't do much of anything. However, because it works most of the time, we really can't justify getting it fixed.

I'm not sure if the heater's issue is the heater itself or just a problem with the vents. When it's time to switch everything to heat, the driver's side heats up really well. The passenger's side blows cold air for a while. This while always varies. Sometimes it only does it for a day or two. Sometimes, it's a few weeks. Finally, however, the vents on the passenger's side accept that they're supposed to be shooting out WARM air now and start doing just that. In the mean time, sitting on that side is not fun.

It's also not fun as the weather starts to heat up. During this time of year, we jump from freezing weather to pretty darn warm weather. And while those warm days would be easier if we could switch the air back to cooling, we really can't until we are certain no more cold days will be happening. The vent thing starts up again if you switch the car to cooling, meaning until we're sure we won't have frigid days, you just have to suffer with no cool air.

And yes, this is annoying, but like I said, it's not completely broken, so we really can't get it fixed. It has a work around, albeit, not a fun one, but still. We manage.

However, days like this make that management a little difficult.