Please bow your heads for the passing of Molly

I owned a 2004 Mazda 3 for nearly a decade. (My wife called it "Molly" - I was never clear why.) Normally, I try to avoid getting the first generation of any tech, because they haven't worked the bugs out yet. However, I got a bargain on it, and if I'd bought it the year before, it would have been called a Protegé.

And to be honest, it worked out pretty well for me (as you could probably tell from the fact that I put 150K miles on it over 10 years). However, it had one problem that I never got past.

The air conditioner in the Mazda 3 was a piece of crap. It never worked well: it cycled on and off, and toward the end, it wouldn't necessarily work at all unless the fan was set to an even number.

Living in Albuquerque, there are only a couple of weeks every year where this was a major problem, so it wasn't that bad, but here's the thing.

Having gone a decade without a truly functional air conditioner, I now have a car where the a/c works, and that's the problem. As it turns out, I can be pretty unreasonable.

See, when it's hot outside, the inside of the car can get pretty hot. And the coolant is way down inside the engine and has to cool off everything between before it can get cold air to me. But what that means to me is that the cold air doesn't come on immediately. I understand the mechanics of it, but when I had a car where I knew that the air conditioner wasn't necessarily going to work, it didn't bother me. Now that the situation has changed, I find myself subconsciously angered by the fact that I don't have instant gratification.

I try to be a reasonable person, but as it turns out, I can get pissed off by physics.