Today is the day my spring semester grades are due. Exams and classes are finished. Which means that the building my office is in, the Grohmann Museum, was not open yet when I came in this morning. Usually, during the term, the building is open by around 7:30 AM so that students can arrive for their 8:00 AM classes. But no classes in the building today, obviously, as the semester is over.

I think the emptiness and lack of classes and the fact that the museum itself doesn’t open to the public until 9:00 AM were all contributors to the fact that when I got here this morning, my office was COLD.

And I was powerless to do anything about it, because I have never understood how the thermostat worked.

Except that this morning, possibly because all I’m doing today is grading and not teaching, which really takes up a lot of brain power, so hence the “absentminded professor” stereotype (due to the fact that we’re constantly thinking about what we’re doing in class), it occurred to me that there must be a manual for that thermostat online.

It’s not like I’ve never thought that before, but previous attempts to search for operating instructions have never panned out for me.

Today, though, I realized that maybe a reverse image search through Google might help me find that manual better than a “search term” search. So I took a photo of the thermostat

and uploaded it to Google’s reverse image search (the little camera next to the microphone on the right side of the search bar

Et voila! Here were all the “image” results returned for my search.

I figured the one at the upper right, the “ManualsLib,” which I assumed meant “Manuals Library,”  looked the most promising. So I clicked on it and found this, with the photos of manual pages across the bottom.

Eventually, after lots of installation instructions, I found this.

And I am in business!

The display is a bit dark for you to see it in my first photo, but if you click on it to enlarge it, you can see that the original temperature was 64.4 °F.

Now it’s already a balmy 64.7 °F!

Headed in the right direction, at least 🙂

UPDATE (even though I haven’t published this till now): I finally warmed up enough to stop shivering and focus on getting my grading done. I just finished and realized that I felt nice and toasty. Checked the thermostat. Oops! This is probably overkill 🙂