Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.

I am tempted to cut my employer a little bit of slack, given how often there’s people working on the HVAC for the building and how we needed the heat on in at least some capacity not even two weeks ago. I mean, I’d have loved it if the temperature in the building dropped a bit because I’m way too warm for my own comfort, but most of my coworkers are still wearing sweatshirts and fleeces, so I’m clearly in the minority here and I already know how it’ll turn out if I try getting the temperature lowered (I got told to buy a second fan the last time I brought it up and there’s not much room to push back after that). Historically, despite the expansion I work in being relatively new and the air system being updated in early pandemic era, we’ve had lots of HVAC issues and it always takes the system a couple days to move between heating and cooling. I just wish the building defaulted to cooling more often so I wouldn’t be spending a day slowly sweating through my clothes every time I moved and then spend the following day feeling waves of warmth radiating off my skin because somehow, despite the HVAC being worked on for the second day in a row and the outside tempertures being lower, my office is just as warm as it was yesterday and the lab is actually two degrees warmer.

Things do not look great for the rest of the summer, especially considering that I’m going to have quite of a bit of heavy labor to do most weeks. It’s only going to get warmer and while I’m sure the AC will be turned on eventually, I am doubting that it will be cool enough for me to not soak through my shirt every single time I have to spend the day testing. I mean, it hopefully won’t be as bad as last year, when I was sweating escessively every time I did anything because of the medication I was on, but it’s not like I enjoy being constantly damp and perspiring to any degree. I drink a ton of water, sure, but even I struggled to keep adequately hydrated back then and I’m not sure things would be any better this summer. I literally started stocking gatorade in the fridge in the break room because I would lose so much salt that water alone wasn’t enough to keep up with my dehrydration. It was pretty miserable and I’m anxious about whether or not this summer will be any better. I mean, I remember being this warm and sweaty last year, but I don’t remember my office being this warm. It was all self-produced last year and now there appear to be external factors complicating my ability to stay cool and hydrated in this office full of really old people who apparently all like this heat. Especially if I don’t have my old fallback of working from home on the particularly bad days like I could in years past.

I had to take a break to sit down so I could cool off between the last paragraph and this one. It’s getting warmer, now, since I’m at work late and the HVAC shuts down (or goes into low-power mode, maybe?) in the evenings, so I have to stop moving entirely to cool off enough to stop sweating. It’s miserable and there really isn’t much I can do about it without buying a bunch more fans or wearing less clothing (which would be against company policy), both of which really feel like I’d be addressing symptoms rather than problems. It’s always easier to warm up than to cool down and all I really want is for the temperature to be lowered into the low 70s. Just a handful of degrees. Everyone should still be comfortable at that temperature, or at least capable of dressing in a way that would make them comfortable, and I’d be able to stop feeling like my brain has to shut down in order to avoid overheating. I’m tired enough as it is without being constantly poked toward the sort of low-energy mode that most mammals enter when they get this warm. I can be a lazy apex predator at home (a start of languid stillness I think of as “lazy lion mode”), basking, unmoving, in the heat in order to remain cool, but I actually have to do stuff at work. I’ve got a job to do, after all, and I don’t know how well I’m going to be able to do it if I’m constantly battling dehydration and sweatiness…