When I'm Sixty-Four

When Paul McCartney wrote this song, the year was 1958 and the young “would-be” Beatle was 16 years old.  Well, I’m 64 now and though I’m a great fan of Paul McCartney, I feel relatively confident in saying that Mr. McCartney hadn't the slightest idea what it was really going to be like when he became 64.  In fact for him, the line from that song “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four” turned out to coincide with his separation from his second wife, Heather Mills – and she still needed him - to the tune of about 100 million dollars!

But back to 2013 and this aging Beatle fan.  At 64, I’d have to say I live in a world that just doesn't feel quite as “user-friendly” as the one I remember from thirty years ago.  In 1983, I thought I was on the cutting edge of what was happening in my field of engineering.  But the concept of “change” has now become a daily (sometimes an hourly) thing for this consultant in HVAC and energy technology.  Occasionally I feel like the people around me are speaking a language they seem to all understand while I just don’t have a clue why the facts are the same but the conclusions seem different.

A couple of years ago, a client asked me to write a simple explanation, in layman’s terms, of why HVAC design engineers always ended up talking about a 55°F supply air temperature for cooling applications.  I wrote the paragraphs that follow based a career of applying basic physics to the technology of building systems.  But stay tuned – in the next installment, I’ll explain why even a mundane topic like this one might change over time.

Author:  Jerry Williams

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