Response to "Climate, change!"

Hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was getting questions about air conditioning, isn't it? But I was. Two Mondays ago (i.e., before crazy Yom Kippur & Ig Week), I posted a letter from a person who was uncomfortably hot, as a houseguest, and wanted to know how, and if, one could request a climate change from one's host.

Subtle hints hadn't worked, so join me on the chorus, kids: STOP USING SUBTLE HINTS. Man, if I have to say that once, I have to say it a million times, don't I? At least most of the commenters agreed. Either ask directly, or don't bother dropping hints. As ashmama put it:

All your hints haven't worked, after all, so your solution of staying in a hotel seems best. However, I do think that if they ask why you are choosing to stay elsewhere, you can be truthful, but if you do this, make yourselves the reason. Rather than saying "Your house is too hot," say "We really like to sleep in a cold room." Then your hosts can decide whether they'd like to provide one for you.

Good call, ashmama. As long as people's behavior is in the realm of the socially acceptable--e.g., they aren't throwing garbage at you--it's always best to phrase requests in terms of your own needs or eccentricities rather than their behavior.

I've said before that Peg Bracken's I Try to Behave Myself is my favorite etiquette book of all time, and her thoughts on the issue are quite uncompromising:

Much unnecessary bowing and you-firsting is done by some hosts and guests, neither knowing who has or is supposed to be have the upper hand. This rule must be clarified: The host and/or hostess do ... After all, it's their life they've invited the guests to share. While they may brisk it up, temporarily, and polish it a bit, they never aimed to revolutionize it ... Thus, when Victoria Goodhost turns up the air conditioning--first asking Shalimar Goodguest if it doesn't seem awfully warm in here--Shalimar says, "Yes indeed," and tells her barking sinuses to pipe down. [Italics in the original]

I agree with this in principle, but this is why so many of you wisely said, "Stay in a hotel."

This is a real ethics, etiquette, and engineering issue, as well. Hosts can, if they have extra fans, space heaters, or window-unit air conditioners, allow guests to customize their sleeping rooms, as Hostness with the Mostess points out:

This issue is why we have our guest room set up with a window AC unit in the summer and an extra plug in oil-filled radiator/heater in the winter. The room has 2 windows so if our guests want fresh air, they can open the other window that doesn't have an AC unit in it. If they are cold in the winter, they can plug in the extra heater. Presumably they have the door closed to their room at night, so they can regulate the temperature however they wish without affecting the rest of the house.

Then again, in some of Boston's older houses, guest discomfort may not be the result of host ill-will or incompetence. It took a couple of years before our landlord and his plumber were able to fix our radiators so that banshee screams and loud knocking weren't the order of the day (and more to the point, night). Mr. Improbable and I had gotten rather used to it--though sleeping through a nightly horror-movie soundtrack may have influenced both my capacity for lucid dreaming and interest in Sam Raimi films--but our guests suffered, and there honestly wasn't anything we could do about it. Gracious hosting can be a problem in big cities, where people are more likely to live in old buildings with eccentricities, or small apartments--and where hotels can be prohibitively expensive. Country mice (and perhaps even more so, suburb mice) who visit town mice need to be prepared to spend a little more money, or be a little less comfortable, than they are used to back home.

If one does have a guest room, one ought to sleep in it occasionally, as Marcus pointed out:

Today people use their "guest rooms" to store whatever they can't find any other place for, and when you're staying with them, that includes you. You'll often find cast-off mattresses that are hard as rocks or soft as marshmallows, dusty pillows, clocks stopped at 4:30 a.m, December 3, 2002, closets and drawers completely stuffed with Cosby sweaters from the '80s (leaving you nowhere to put your own clothes), file boxes teeming with papermites, and a museum display of every Dell computer they've owned for the past decade. The owners have no idea what it's actually like to sleep in such a room, the equivalent of an in-home self-storage pod. So they don't know that sunlight pierces the broken miniblinds and slices through your cornea at 6 a.m., or that you can hear the aquarium filter buzzing all night, or that the polyester sheets are hot, and smell funny.

abigail adams, who got into it with Marcus but good over the question of Facebook condolences, took another shot:

Geez, Marcus (21), you sound like a living Princess and the Pea -- I bet people are relieved when you decide to stay in a hotel. On the plus side for you: then you'll have plenty of free stationery for writing all those hand written condolence notes you like to send.

Does anyone see a potential romantic comedy in the works here, in which it turns out that Marcus and abigail actually know each other in real life, have mutual unexpressed crushes, and aren't aware that they are each others' worst nemeses on an etiquette blog? I'm seeing David Hyde Pierce or Michael C. Hall for Marcus, but who for abigail? (Anyone suggesting the overexposed, minimally talented Jennifer Aniston or Sandra Bullock will be banned. Just kidding. Not really.)

Kathy agreed, and follows the advice herself:

One thing my husband and I do is sleep in our guest room once in the summer and once in the winter to see what our guest experience is like! Helps us be better hosts when the time comes. see the cobwebs we miss in regular cleanings, what it's like to stare at that ceiling, the noises that come from the street, etc.

In general, it seems the best advice is to be a good sport and willing to compromise--and be willing to stay in a hotel if compromise isn't possible. Which it may well not be, since by definition we aren't talking about a matter of two or three temperature degrees, but of people whose idea of comfort is 65 versus those for whom it is 80. Neither would be happy at 72, I'm betting.

moi has a problem with air conditioning--

Air Conditioning gives me a sore throat and stuffy nose and it does this to a lot of people. Plus it's loud and uses a lot of electricity and is horribly polluting. And then some people just like it warmer than others. If you want AC so much, then offer to pay for the electricity. If it makes them ill or they are trying to go green then leave them alone about it. Don't be such a wimp that you can't live without air conditioning - this summer was cool and I haven't used mine in two years.

---and no bloody empathy for those of us who have an equal problem with the heat. Nice, moi. I'm glad that only your suffering is real and that of people on the opposite side of the spectrum are "wimps." Must make life terribly convenient for you. Many people do suffer like hell in the heat--I'm one of them. And I'm married to a man who is also made ill by air conditioning. Which means, in the summer, we sleep in separate beds as necessary--me in the air-conditioned guest room, him in the open-windowed bedroom. This isn't ideal, but it works a good sight better than name-calling and the egotistic belief that if another person is having an experience you don't share, they are being delusional or weak.