Air Conditioning Woes

    We have an air conditioning system in our house that is very odd. There are two outside units connected to all of the inside units, one for downstairs and one for upstairs. Each room that has an AC unit in it can be controlled separately, but all the units on one floor depend on their corresponding outside unit to work. This complicated system was put in place by a single company and no one except the lone technician working for that company can fix any problems we have. It usually takes several days to get this guy to come work on our system and for one miserable week last July he was on vacation while the upstairs (bedroom) AC unit stopped working. There was, apparently, no one else in the whole country who could understand the system. (That seemed very fishy, but it's not our country or our language so there wasn't much we could do.) An added layer to this complication is that the power to the outside units is controlled by the management company for the neighborhood. They turn the power off for every AC unit in the neighborhood at some arbitrary date in the fall and won't turn it on until May at the earliest. The same is also true of the heating. Last fall our upstairs AC stopped working again, but since it was close to the turn off date the management company refused to call the technician. 

    Knowing that it was already broken, last week we contacted our realtor, who is the intermediary between us and the management company. We asked to have the repairs completed before the weather got too warm. Doing this (we found out) would require briefly turning on the power to the system to confirm our AC was still not working. However, this was apparently too much to ask. The management company again refused to even touch the power button until 'sometime in May', no date given. When this arbitrary date comes around we won't even know, and when it does happen we will have a broken AC unit that still needs to be fixed. 

     It is very hard to understand the reasoning behind this system. It may have something to do with the very hierarchical structure of Korean society. Those at the top control everything they can and those at the bottom just have to deal with whatever the managers decide. It probably also has to do with the Korean tendency to never spend any more than they absolutely have to. This means that things like ACs and heaters are never used until everyone is actually suffering from the outside temperatures. Our lease dictates that the single lump sum we pay each year will cover our rent plus any and all utilities and repair bills. Nothing comes out of our pockets at all related to house expenses. While it sounds nice in a way, what it means is that any money that doesn't absolutely have to be spent is not spent and the only leverage we have is to not renew the lease for the following year until certain conditions are met. This system is only true for civilians, however. The Army people in our neighborhood (who are the vast majority of the neighbors) do have to pay their own utility bills each month. Why they have to fall under the same system I cannot fathom. It must be due more to the cultural hierarchical thinking and not as much to the money-saving disposition. 

    It can be very interesting and enlightening to live in a foreign country and learn how other people live and view the world. In this case, however, I can't find much to admire and find the whole thing ridiculously aggravating!