Last week, I opened up the inside part of the air conditioner, which was not 
cooling, and found that the coils were covered with dust. I asked the 
apartment office to send someone to fix it, as I had tried to clean it with a 
loofa, which didn't do much good.

The maintenance man came Thursday and decided to move the outside part to the 
ground (it was on the lower roof; some years ago they built a new roof on top 
of the old one) and replace the coils (which were not only dusty but also 
rusty). He has seen me measure things such as a tree by its shadow and the 
distance to the entrance gate (the latter is 200 m, which is what the bicycle 
odometer said). So he asked me how long a tube it would take to reach from 
the middle of the lower roof to the edge and down to the ground. I paced the 
distance, added three meters, and told him eight. "What's that in feet?" he 
asked. Instead of answering that, I got my measuring tape and unrolled it on 
the tubes he had laid out on the ground. He did not believe me and went some 
distance farther and cut the tubes.

I then took the tape and found that the actual distance from the middle of the 
roof (using the light bulb outside to mark it) to the edge is only 3.7 m. 
That meant my pace was only 530 mm, not 678 mm. This did not surprise me, as 
my feet were healing from arthritis. I explained why I knew my pace (it's one 
of the things we measured in Surveying 1). He proceeded to connect the tubes 
and the wire. When he finished, he showed me the excess. He said that I was 
right and if he had listened to me, he'd have had enough left over to do 
another apartment.

Pierre
-- 
lo ponse be lo mruli po'o cu ga'ezga roda lo ka dinko

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