The Day We Considered Oven Mitts Personal Protective Equipment

Every family has at least one saying that only makes sense after you've lived through it. In my family, it was, "It's hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell."

As a kid, I thought it was just another one of those colorful Midwestern expressions adults liked to throw around whenever July rolled into western Kansas. Right alongside "hotter than a popcorn popper," "sweatin' like a sinner in church," and "it's not the heat, it's the humidity." They weren't scientific measurements. They were simply the way our grandparents translated weather into something you could actually feel.

Then came Monday the 27th of July. The National Weather Service called it a heat advisory. The weather app insisted it was one hundred and nine degrees with a heat index pushing one hundred and fifteen. The cicadas had already started screaming before nine in the morning, the blacktop outside the dealership shimmered like water, and every vehicle on the front line had been slowly baking in the sun since sunrise. Walking across the lot felt like opening an oven door, except instead of checking on a casserole, I was climbing into another truck with a steering wheel hot enough to make me wonder if potholders should be considered standard dealership equipment.

Working at a dealership in July already requires a certain level of optimism. While it's not the hardest job in the world or even the most rewarding, it has its challenges. Every black leather seat is determined to sear itself into your memory. Seat belt buckles become branding irons. The keys are hot enough that you find yourself juggling them from one hand to the other before you even reach the driver's door. By lunchtime, I had driven enough vehicles that I genuinely believed an oven mitt would be a reasonable addition to my desk drawer. Not because I planned on baking anything, but because I had grown tired of pretending the steering wheels weren't actively trying to remove my fingerprints.

Normally, none of that is a problem because relief waits on the other side of the front doors. You move a vehicle, wipe the sweat off your forehead, and head back inside where the air conditioner reminds you life is still worth living.

At least, that's how it usually works. Around ten thirty someone noticed the showroom wasn't cooling off anymore. At first we blamed the revolving door of customers walking inside. Every time those doors opened, another wave of Kansas heat rolled through the building. Maybe it was just the fact they were giant glass doors on a wall lined with several giant glass windows. Then someone held a hand over one of the vents. Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Within minutes we all realized the same thing. The air conditioner had quit. Nobody panicked immediately because that's not how Midwesterners handle a crisis. We deny it first.

"It'll kick back on."

"It's probably just working hard."

"It'll catch up."

It did none of those things. Instead, the building slowly became an extension of the parking lot.

The technicians in the shop barely noticed because they never had central air conditioning to begin with. They had something better. Scattered throughout the shop were a handful of portable air conditioning units that suddenly became the most coveted possessions in the dealership. Those little machines followed technicians from bay to bay all afternoon, and everyone else learned very quickly that the cool air belonged to whoever was holding the wrench. Every now and then someone would casually wander a little too close just to steal a few seconds of cold air before quietly moving along like they hadn't been caught.

By noon, the entire dealership had entered survival mode. Customers apologized for sweating before they introduced themselves. Shirts clung to backs. The asphalt outside looked like it was melting. Every trip across the lot required a small amount of mental preparation because you knew exactly what waited inside every vehicle. Hot seats. Hot keys. Hot steering wheels. More than once I caught myself gripping the wheel with the very tips of my fingers while wondering if potholders were sold in the parts department.

The remarkable thing about extreme heat is how quickly it changes people. Nobody became angry all at once. It happened gradually. Someone sighed because the printer jammed. Someone else couldn't find a key. A customer wanted to look at the truck parked in the very last row of the lot, naturally. Conversations became shorter. Patience became thinner. Sweat started running down my back and into places I had never previously considered capable of perspiring. By two o'clock I had accepted that every article of clothing I was wearing had become permanently attached to my body.

Of course, everyone had an explanation.

"It's not the heat."

"It's the humidity."

"It's the corn."

Every summer somebody insists the corn is putting moisture back into the air. Whether that's meteorology or Midwest folklore no longer matters because everyone agrees with it. The corn gets blamed for the humidity, the humidity gets blamed for the misery, and the misery gets blamed for everyone's increasingly questionable attitude.

Sometime around four o'clock someone carried two ice cold watermelons into the break room. I have never witnessed morale improve so quickly. Salesmen wandered in from the showroom. Technicians emerged from the shop and detailers appeared from the swamp that was the detail bay. For fifteen glorious minutes nobody complained about the weather, the broken air conditioner, or the customers. We simply stood there eating cold watermelon in complete silence, united by the shared understanding that refrigerated fruit was the closest thing to hope any of us had seen all day.

The repair technician arrived a day later, climbed onto the roof, and eventually came back down shaking his head.

"What happened?" someone asked.

"It froze up."

We all stared at him.

"It was one hundred and nine degrees."

He shrugged.

Apparently even air conditioners have their breaking point.

As I drove home that evening with my cars air conditioner finally blowing cold air across my face, I found myself thinking about my grandparents. They never checked the forecast before walking outside. They didn't need a weather app to tell them about heat indexes or humidity percentages. They simply stepped onto the porch, listened to the cicadas screaming from the cottonwoods, looked across the shimmering prairie, and said, "Well, it's hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell."

After spending one Monday at a dealership without air conditioning, I finally realized they weren't exaggerating. They were reporting the weather.