My husband and I signed up last month to work at a kids’ event in our neighborhood.
Every summer, the community leaders always do a big summer carnival for the neighborhood kids, and usually it’s pretty fun. Everything is free, and they give away ice cream and cotton candy and hot dogs. They also do free face painting and balloons and things like that. The kids love it, and for kids who don’t have a family with a lot of money to spend, it’s a great summertime event that they look forward to. Anyway, when we went inside the building, it was nice and cool. The air conditioning was running full speed and there was cool air flowing in through all of the air vents in the ceilings and floors. I thought that was good because the temperature that day was almost ninety degrees! Well, once we’d been working for about an hour, I noticed that the temperature in the room was really heating up. I looked around and saw that the other adult volunteers were sweating like crazy. The kids didn’t seem to even notice how much the building was heating up, but I got pretty miserable fairly quickly. Then the lady who was in charge of the event came over to our table and said that the air conditioning system died on us. It was so hot in there by the end of the night that my shirt looked like it was drenched in sweat. I didn’t realize how much I needed air conditioning until I didn’t have it!