Well, 9 is the current magic number. We have been without water in our apartment for 9 days now. The water lines for this building are real screwy. Each building has 4 units and each unit has 5 apartments in it. This is the screwy part, rooms 1 on floors 1 to 7 all have the same incoming water line, rooms 2 on floors 1 to 7 all have the same incoming water line, and so on and so forth. It just so happens that my room is number 3 and the water line broke in room number 3 on the first floor. It didn’t completely break, because I can still flush the toilet, if I let it sit for about 1 hour without touching it, but the only water we have to wash with, cook with and clean with is our drinking water (which is delivered whenever we need it). It also happens that the people living in the first floor apartment 3 are assholes. Yes, their water pressure decreased (as you go higher, the water pressure gets worse; we have a trickle, floor 7 has nothing), and they had to notice some moisture on their floors, but they didn’t say anything, even when asked, because they had water and that is all that is important to them. For 9 days I’ve been taking a shower out of a bowl, brushing my teeth out of a glass of water, and eating at nearly every restaurant in our area. Our landlord told us that it would get fixed today, evidently, nobody told the repair men. I really like our new landlord, we told her that we didn’t have any water and she called the maintenance department and brought us 2 more 5-gallon bottles of drinking water. Our last landlord didn’t want to do anything when we needed it. They just said, call and get it done, we will reimburse you later, then they fought with us over the reimbursement. I usually hate the sight of repair men coming into the building, it generally means that I’m not going to get much sleep because of the drilling and hammering that always follows their appearance. Today, I couldn’t wait to just catch a glimpse of one. Tomorrow is Christmas and it looks to be one without water. There are public showers I could go to, but I’d rather not. I would rather take a shower in my own apartment, an apartment that I am being grossly over-charged for, an apartment that is good for nothing except sleeping, tv, internet and a place to keep my stuff. In the last 9 days, I’ve eaten McDonalds at least 3 times, KFC once, and 2 other little restaurants once each, I usually only go out to eat 1 time a week at the most. In addition, I’ve been buying the meals from work about every other night and eating leftovers from the restaurants the other nights. I haven’t been able to do any laundry in 9 days, there is a huge pile forming in the bedroom. There are dirty dishes in the sink where the grime and grease is just solidifying into an unwashable mass. Ok, sorry for the complaining. Let me tell you why it is taking so long to get this fixed. Since the broken pipe is under the first floors apartment, the old couple told the maintenance crew that they could not fix the pipe unless they repaired any damage they did to their floor afterwards. The repair men had to go back to the maintenance office to get approval for this (WTF!!!). The maintenance office could not approve that expense (WTF!!!) so they had to go to their city office. The city office could not approve this expenditure either (sigh), so they had to seek permission from the city government’s maintenance department (yay, red tape and bribery). We were told that since it was not the entire unit (remember, just apartments 3 on all floors), it wasn’t going to be so easy to get approval. If it had been the entire unit, it would have been fixed the second day (W T F!!!!!!!!!!!!). We were told that we would have to negotiate with the people in the first floor apartment to get it fixed. Negotiate what, I have no idea, but my question is WHY?!?!?!?! W T F!!!!!! Just come and fix the g-damn pipe and then repair the people’s g-damn floor, it’s not that difficult. What is all this need for negotiating and seeking approval, if it was part of the agreement when the apartment was purchased, then fix it and then repair their floor.
Anyway, I’m done ranting. I need to get ready for work anyway.
