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(length warning, this is long and rambly, as is my wont, so if you don't want to read and comment on my water woes, skip on. For those of you who don't there is a game: spot the water puns, it's fun and there is absolutely no prize at the end for getting them all right)
Hmm, So i just got home from work this evening, and for the second time since we've moved in, the washing machine totally flooded, which means that the kitchen bits had to be shifted about and the carpet will have to be dried again, now this is not as bad as the first time it flooded where the torrent of soapy water covered the top of my wife's feet as she ran into turn the washing machine off. It is still annoying and it stirred the following in my mind.
Normally i would just chalk this up to gadget hilarity and go about my day, but reflection over the last year and a half in this apartment has forced me to consider that this might, just might be some sort of message, but damned if i know what the message says. So i am enlisting your support in puzzling it out, yes i know the people affected are supposed to be all into figuring it out on their own, but once you read the rest of what's happened here water wise, you might suspect i am immune to clueage, especially since this is only just now occurring to me.
So to begin, when we first moved into this lovely apartment we really liked it (in truth we still do) it was pretty and clean and most (all?) of the furnishings were quite nice. But from the beginning there were problems. For example, the first night we spent here, i naively tried to turn the kitchen water faucet on, when it exploded. Now i didn't really understand that water could explode before this happened to me, but allow me to say that with almost no force i ripped the faucet head right off the sink and water GUSHED everywhere. Strike one, but no cause to suspect anything, right?
Later we started to notice that every time either of us took a shower, massive amounts of water (almost like there's a theme, huh?) would magically appear next to the bathtub when we were done. Now my wife and I aren't barbarians, we have a shower curtain and we keep it inside the tub while showering, but despite our efforts, the puddles of water would appear whenever either of us would finish. I (being the marvelous problem solver type that i am) went at this problem with gusto, and quickly discovered that water was seeping down from the corner of the tub rim onto the floor. It turns out that places like Bed, Bath and Beyond actually stock products for just such a problem. So i installed plastic and caulk guards on the tub to eliminate the drip. It didn't work, nor has it ever completely worked. At this point we have given up and we just dry the floor with a towel after every shower. I should mention we have a bath mat and use it, it just doesn't help.
Next, we noticed a funny looking hole in our guest shower with brown and yellow streaks leading down into the bathtub from the hole. I figured it was just old and since we didn't really use that bathroom anyway, who cares, right? Well it turns out our A/C unit is over our guest bathroom and that is the water outlet for the A/C drip pan. Well about a month after throwing the towel in on the main shower leaking problem the guest shower started hemorrhaging water like a Bush attorney before congress (we could only wish). Well not long after that we implemented the little triangular water blockey things in that shower too (stupid things should be called dysfunctional shower patches) we should have known they wouldn't work there, but we figured it was worth the shot since short of chopping the blasted things into mulch we weren't doing anything else with them. So finally after calling maintenance twice for the A/C drip problem it too achieved a fixed-like state.
Next (oh yes, there is more, much more...) we noticed that every time we take a shower a small (about a foot in diameter) water spot creeps out on the ceiling in the corner of our main shower. i wish i could say more about this one, but no one has any idea, including the people who are supposed to fix it and we have just continued showering in the hopes that the entire roof doesn't come splashing down on us one day.
Some time between the last incident and the next one, our washing machine overflowed for the first time. My wife was home alone and the cats started acting like, well like horrid, icky burning water was encroaching on their territory from some unknown source, which, technically it was. It took two days and every towel in the house to fix that flood, we since had the washing machine serviced, but (obviously) that did not resolve the problem.
Here is the doosey: About 3 months into moving here, we noticed that every time there was a heavy rain the ceiling of our master closet would get sort of wet and look vaguely like it was mildewing. I should probably mention here that we live on the second story of a third story building. There are people above us who have no problems even remotely like this. We called maintenance and they came out and kindly painted the mildew the original white for us. Of course this didn't really help, and for the last year and three months we live in dread of heavy rains as they cause the roof of our main closet to leak. Leak is such a funny word, when I think of leak i always imagine the occasional drip from some hose or pipe that slowly but lightly seeps water out. Our closet made me redefine the word leak. To date, our closet has POURED water during heavy rains, contractors have been out four times trying to fix our water problem and still as i sit here typing this, there are two "flow holes" drilled in our ceiling so the water from the rains is channeled into the sheet metal bin apartment management has kindly provided to catch the flood of water we now expect when the heavens open up. The last time we spoke with maintenance they said that they would have to cut a chunk out of the ceiling in the closet before they could say definitively what the problem is.
So being magically minded and a little drained from all the mopping about (look, bonus puns) I have decided to appeal to yall to see if my problems are merely a series of extremely unfortunate water related catastrophes or if there is some dark water spirit etc we have greatly offended and to whom we should begin making oblations before we are both drowned in our sleep.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
Fr Pontikos |
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