I’m considered somewhat hidebound by a lot of people. That’s OK. You develop a thick hide after a while of being hidebound. I like traditional stuff more than is popular right now. As a matter of fact, more than is allowed right now. On further reflection, more than is legal right now. My family has been referred to as “The Amish” by some of our relatives, not entirely with affection. They came to our house and they couldn’t watch broadcast television. That’s all it took to earn the sobriquet. Needless to say, they only came once.

On the other hand, we’re fairly cutting edge on many fronts, although it might not seem so to many. I get asked about my heat pump heating system by people who regard us as barely walking upright, for instance. One can’t help but notice that several of my cro-magnon relatives installed heat pumps in their caves when they found out we neanderthals had central air conditioning, and they didn’t, even though their houses cost twenty or thirty times what ours did.

The true reason for this disconnect between our image and reality is a confusion about what true progress is. In many ways, our family is trying to live in the future, and peevishly waiting for technology and culture to catch up with us. It’s not our fault that society has decided that a Dickensian lifestyle of dissipated illegitimate subsidized squalor should be called progress, as long as the workhouses have a Facebook page. That’s not progress. Progress is when things get better. Period. It’s not when things get more complicated. It’s not when you need a phone to turn on your light switches or buy a cup of coffee.

So for example, we had to wait around for manufacturers to figure out how to make a heat pump that worked in our climate, make it affordable, and make it so I could install it myself. I wanted one long before they existed. Fixing the existing oil burning boiler in our dilapidated house would have been an exercise in nostalgia, if you ask me. The same people who call us Amish would understand it, but honestly, it’s a barbarous way to make heat. We bided our time and made do with firewood and pellets. They weren’t exactly cutting edge technologies, but we were selecting from the tallest midgets in the circus. They seemed less crazy than paying through the nose every month for a giant tub of black Venezuelan goo in the basement to heat our house.

So I was more than ready for another answer, a better answer, and lo and behold, it showed up. I’m skeptical of everything to the point of cynicism, but I assure you I know a good thing when I see it. I found this video:

Now, let’s call this what it is. It’s marketing. This video is made by Mr. Cool, and they didn’t make it out of the goodness of their hearts. But it wasn’t a commercial. It was very old school marketing. They wanted to convey important information about their products to A: Increase brand awareness, and B: Overcome conventional attitudes about heat pumps using factual information. It’s way, way more honest and informative than anything that’s been published or broadcast in the news media since the Maine was sunk.

They’re not stupid, and while the better angels of their marketing department might have made this video, elision is still a form of fibbing. They’re not just in Grand Forks North Dakota because it’s cold there. I get suspicious, and poked around, and found out Grand Forks has some of the cheapest electrical rates in the country. This thing will work wherever you are in the US, but your mileage will most definitely vary when the electric bill comes. But still, it is what it is.

If you’ve ever been in a position to purchase materials and equipment for a large organization, you might be familiar with this form of marketing. Big companies hire outside salespeople to visit other big companies in order to increase brand awareness and overcome price and delivery hesitancy. These salespeople were good at hail-fellow-well-met handshakes and golf. They knew good restaurants to plop your tired purchasing manager ass in, and they knew enough to pick up the check, too. They generally knew every damn thing about the products they were trying to sell. If they didn’t, they didn’t sell much. They had an effective mixture of information and personality.

I was later informed that Mr. Cool has an enormous presence on broadcast TV. They run the same sorts of information-free, aspirational sales pitches with unfunny jokes ladled all over them and women in low-cut dresses that all companies foist on television audiences. Of course I’d never see them, but everyone who called us Amish had seen them 10,000 times. They didn’t reach for their checkbooks until they heard about ours, though.

Sometimes pioneers are those skeletons you see by the side of the trail with arrows sticking out of their bleached rib cages. Sometimes they’re the guys with A/C in August. They’re never the guys who stay home and watch TV.