Arkansas HVACR NewsMagazine September 2020

S tate, National, Chapter News Feature Story

I do not know when but am as sure of this fact as I am that the sun is gonna ’ shine in the morning. Fortunately, many in our business have done very well this summer. The HVACR industry is an “ ESSENTIAL ” service to Arkansans. You can ’ t just shut it down. The more people are at home, the more they need air conditioning. Unlike a liquor store, it is a comfort as well as a life and death situation. Take the air conditioning out of hospitals, the refrigeration out of food processing, the comfort ac away from homes and businesses and what do you have? You have death, sickness, discontent, and discomfort on an unprecedented scale. Our industry has not gone into seclusion, cocooning ourselves in the basements of our homes. Our industry has gone into homes, businesses, hospitals, food processing, and factories to keep them operating. We have worn masks and adopted measures to ensure that customers as well as techs are safe. It sounds corny but our industry has done what was necessary while some politicians have shamefully disparaged others for political gain. The HVACR industry has put themselves at risk to provide the much needed service of air conditioning and refrigeration. They are the first responders to a bad compressor, a burned out contactor, or a shorted fan motor. We salute them for their selfless service to every homeowner, business, hospital, industry and food processor that needs service--- now, at midnight and on weekends. In attics and crawlspaces, on their back between the deep fryer and grill, stretching to reach the back of a ice

machine, under pressure to get the cooling system of medical equipment working, on tops of offices and warehouses suffering 120+ degrees of heat, repairing chillers and cooling towers--it is the HVACR professional that has kept this state and country going during this pandemic. There are many other trades that have similarly sacrificed so Americans can have some degree of normalcy. It is the trades, like the unsung heroes that drove Godzilla back into the depths, that have put themselves on the front line. As normalcy returns on the movie screen, our lives will also return to normalcy. It will not stay this way forever. When it does, I look forward to shaking hands, laughing over a meal, and sitting by a fellow HVACR professional in a class. This has been the strangest summer any of us have ever experienced and we hope it will never happen again.