DC is unpleasant w/o A/C

Ok, so our townhouse has two air conditioning units and one of them up and died last week. Sadly, even though I'm technically a licensed professional engineer that specialized in HVAC, I'm still not a technician. The best I could do was check the circuits, change the filters, test the thermostat, and identify where the problem was. One of the copper lines had frosted over, so the coolant wasn't flowing and it was likely that a pump had failed. This was confirmed by the technician.

So anyways, it's now something like Day 4 without A/C on the top two floors (where the bedrooms are) and DC is still unpleasantly hot. Yes, I know, I've been in hotter places without A/C but to be able to walk through a thermocline inside your house is a little ridiculous. We're talking around a 15-20 F degree difference. We've been lucky to have rainstorms to cool down the air fast enough in the evenings, but we've still got several fans going to force air circulation through the upper floors.

Ok, this was actually in Germany during the summer, but the sentiment is the same.

What's amusing to me about this whole thing is that it's almost the exact opposite of what happened to us in Germany when we accidentally forgot to remind our landlord to refill the fuel oil tank and we had no heat during a cold snap in the German winter. This time, we've lost our cool in the summer heat of the muggy swamp known as greater D.C. But chances are, if we were overseas and something like this happened, we'd probably be more tolerant of the situation because in the greater scheme of things, there really are worse things than having to sleep on top of the sheets with a fan blowing on you.