I'll Keep You Posted

It was so damned cold.

First the heater didn't work and I didn't notice and I sat for hours trying to focus on grading papers in the freezing cold of my basement apartment before V came home and said, "The heater doesn't work." The pilot light was out. I lit it the next day. First time. Felt like a man (not for the first time).

Then there was water all over the bathroom floor coming from the laundry room on the other side of the wall where the furnaces and the water heaters are, too. The next day there were ice sickles hanging from the pipes and the washing machine was full of water that was cold but not frozen and there was nothing to be done. By me. The washing machine guy couldn't fix it until the ice thawed.

Then the landlord's mother, Margie, brought a space heater that I was to keep on low in the laundry room until the ice was gone so I told my upstairs neighbor that if he smelled smoke coming from the stairs while I was gone it was smoke coming from the stairs and that he should call the fire department.

Then we woke up to a bubble in the bedroom ceiling that was getting bigger and coming from the bathroom-side wall and the landlord in New York was worried that maybe whatever had caused the washing machine problem had caused the ceiling bubble, too, so he sent a plumber over. Two, actually. But not for two more days because the landlord in New York did not "sense" that this was an urgent problem.

The plumbers tore open the bubble in the ceiling and decided that the upstairs neighbor's toilet was leaking because they could see the base of the toilet and there was water all over it but the upstairs neighbor was at work so they couldn't do anything until he showed up to open his place which was the next day. So I moved the couch up against the little Christmas tree and dismantled the bed frame and moved our mattresses into the living room. I feared the mold.

Then the plumbers came back and got into the upstairs neighbor's place and fixed the toilet and convinced the landlord in New York that, due to the fact that the dripping in my bedroom had stopped, the toilet in the upstairs neighbor's place was the cause of the dripping and not the laundry room problem. He was skeptical but they were right.

The upstairs neighbor informed me that he was ready to do his laundry again.

Then the water damage people came and examined the water damage and told us they'd have to rip out the ceiling and the bedroom wall and the bathroom wall and maybe some of the bathroom ceiling and some of the upstairs neighbor's floors and walls and dry it all off and dehumidify it and sand off the mold and then put it all back together again and that this would take weeks. Weeks of living in the living room, which sound more appropriate than it seems.

Then the washing machine guy came back in the morning and almost fixed the washing machine but not all the way because he had forgotten to check whether or not the valves in the washing machine had been affected by the freezing and one of them had but he didn't have the part so he had to come back the next day.

Then another water damage person came from another company and waved his magic wand around and rubbed the walls and the ceiling and said pretty much the same thing that the first water damage people said but made it sound a little bit more fun and shaved about a week off of the time-frame so the landlord in New York decided to go with him even though he's scheduled a third water damage company to examine the problem on Monday. This, of course, will be a waist of time for the third company.

An insurance leach is coming on Monday, too.

The washing machine repair man came again, then, and fixed the valve in the washing machine but noticed when he turned the water back on that the water valve in the wall was also damaged and leaking most likely as the result of the original freezing problem that may or may not have caused the washing machine problem and that the landlord in New York had wrongly decided had caused the ceiling bubble.

This means that we will be calling the plumbers again.

On the bright side, the landlord in New York isn't too worried about the water damage being repaired right away because the general fear of mold was not so general even a few years ago and, in fact, he has friends in New York that eat stinky cheese--moldy cheese--and try to get him to try it so he does but it makes him gag but he's making an effort and so eating mold isn't a big deal so it's not dangerous and so we're set.

What was your finals week like?