Sometimes bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them. It isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just a whimsical expression of misfortune. Your parents get divorced. Your dog gets hit by a van. The air conditioning goes out in your office.

We’re dealing with the last one right now. Our office is on the top floor of a building with a painted metallic roof, and the result is like being trapped in a sauna with your friends without any of the tearful stories or homoeroticism.

To keep things in perspective, here’s the list of places hotter than this office.

7) The Volcano from the Movie Volcano –

Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche can tell you, that thing was hot.  It was so hot it melted Anne Heche's career.

6) Grandma’s Living Room –

If the heat didn’t make you uncomfortable enough, seeing the funeral cards on the coffee table, booster seat on the toilet, and your dead grandpa’s things around the house would.

5) Some Parts of Africa –

Specifically El Azizia in Libya, where the temperature once hit 135.9 °F (that’s 57.7 °C for our readers with better systems of measurements and stronger currencies than us). That’s pretty hot, and it was probably difficult to be funny in those circumstances, too. Still, that’s a desert, so it has the whole dry heat thing happening. There is nothing dry here. Everything is covered in sweat and weeping.

4) A Catholic Grammer School Classroom –

If you went to Catholic Grammer school, you probably remember how awful the month of June was. There was never air conditioning and you always had to wear a horrible uniform of polyester pants, button-down shirt and tie. Priests and nuns would use these instances as a way to tell students that the heat was somehow their fault (masturbation) and that it will be even hotter in hell.

3) The Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Circles of Hell –

We may have Jay LaPlante running around without pants, but we don’t have rivers of boiling blood, people whose feet are on fire or people trapped in burning tombs. That’s what you get in circles 6-8 of Hell, according to Dante. The other circles? Snow, rivers, ice, a soul-crushing absence of God… Whatev.

2) The Corona of the Sun –

The Sun's corona is much hotter (by a factor of nearly 200) than the visible surface of the Sun: the photosphere's average temperature is 5800 kelvin compared to the corona's one to three million kelvin.  Or, roughly twice the temperature here in sweltering Long Island City.

1) Mordor –

The fires of Mount Doom in Mordor were hot enough to destroy the One Ring, so it is probably hotter than the edit room in the offices, which are merely hot enough to destroy tapes. It’s possible that one is becoming the other, because Train was overheard muttering in the Black Speech while cutting net_work.