Last weekend - not this one just past, but the one before that - we came in on Saturday afternoon after a brisk day of running around. I was going to make a traditional English breakfast for dinner.
[Digression: Cost Plus World Market is a few minutes away from our apartment. They carry honest-to-God English baked beans. If we go there, we always buy a few cans. They are good.]
So I'm messing around in the kitchen - but I haven't yet turned the oven on - when the smoke detector starts to screech. But it sounds kind of gargly.
That's because there is water pouring out of it. That doesn't usually happen.
So Sonya and the baby and the dog go out on the porch to get away from the horrid watery screaming. I stuck a bucket under the flow of water and pried the cover off of the smoke detector. I found that it's one of those that is wired directly instead of battery-powered. This made me quit messing with it immediately. I called the management.
Surprisingly enough for late on a Saturday afternoon, they sent someone right over. He reached right up and unplugged the damned thing like he wasn't even afraid of electrocution. Then he went upstairs, to the apartment above us that I was pretty sure was empty.
He came back a few minutes later.
"I gotta go get a key for the third floor," he said, "it coming from up there."
He came back about an hour later.
"The guy who lived up there must have flushed his toilet and left," he said, "'cause it flooded his place, the one over you, and got all the way down here..."
"So you're saying," Sonya asked, "that all of this is toilet water?"
"Someone else's toilet water," I clarified.
It also stained our walls around the bathroom door and made a most unpleasant cold and wet spot on the carpet by the same bathroom door. But the management knows it's not our fault, so what can you do?
And then! Friday morning I get up and take a shower. The water wasn't too hot. I noticed it, sure, but I didn't think anything of it. Then Sonya got in the shower and proceeded to hoot and screech!
"Cold! Ooh! Ooh! Cold cold cold!"
And the hot water was gone.
Friday afternoon we got home and there was no hot water. At all. Again the maintenance man was called. He spent all of two minutes in the bathroom, looking at the hot water heater.
"We're gonna have to replace it," he told us, "but don't worry. That's an emergency issue - it'll be done tommorrow."
"It better be fixed," I said to Sonya later, "'cause all the hot water was one of the reasons I rented this place. That's a nice amenity."
We left town Friday afternoon. We got back Saturday night. Lots of hot water!
