A piece of seasonal advice: if you’re going to buy an air conditioner, don’t base your choice on the lack of noise it makes in the store. You just don’t realize how the ambient brouhaha hides the tchiling-tchilings and, more importantly, the big BANG!s every time the compressor starts and stops. Trust the decibels instead — or, better yet, the price. 150€? Yeah, right.

Now all I can do is get used to it. Last night I got woken up a couple of times by the BANG!s mentioned above, with the impression that someone had just slammed my door shut (probably on their way to come and kill me, because who else than an assassin would slam my door in the middle of the night, when it’s locked shut?). Fortunately, unlike the old air conditioner I had borrowed from my parents in order to test the whole concept, this one makes a perfectly regular, smooth noise apart from the starts and stops (at least for now, but no doubt it’ll get old and clunky very soon) so I have no trouble going back to sleep. Or not — I did get awake enough to remember it afterwards.