Yeah. Never had a
blog before. Can't say that I ever felt the need for one, nor the use. But, well, there comes a time in a young man's life, when holes in the ceiling of his apartment, coupled with a high-strung wife, drive him to...... I don't know, start a blog. I guess. It was that, or a murderous rampage of biblical proportions, and I really wanted to save that for retirement. So, blog.
Yeah, I've got holes in my ceiling. Gaping holes. My upstairs neighbour left for work one morning a few weeks ago, leaving his washing machine on. I guess we all do that from time to time. You're in a hurry, and you absolutely
have to have those wet clothes waiting for you when you get back, right? I mean,
no one was there to put them in the drier. The apartment was vacant. This last point is critical, and I'll get to that in a moment. Meanwhile, just to stress this point...
Why the fuck would you turn the washer on before you leave for an 8-hour work shift? You're just going to have to wash it again. You know, if you leave a load of laundry in the machine, wet, for 8 hours
, it is going to smell bad. That is a fact, you god damned mongoloid meat puppet. By starting the washer before leaving,
you have saved yourself exactly no time at all. You dumb fuck.
To return to the original fact, the apartment directly above mine was vacant when the aforementioned washing machine's hose broke, spewing gallons upon gallons of water. My understanding of the incident is that the water, thus liberated, filled up the bathroom, then moved on to the dining room and living room area. From there, it proceeded to infiltrate the floorboards, past the insulation, and made a brief stop above my ceiling. This occurred over the course of about, oh, 2 or 3 hours, I'd say.
Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, the water had finally penetrated to the point where it could begin leaking.... oh, excuse me,
torrentially pouring down the walls of
my bathroom. The sound of this was our first warning that something was amiss, but it took some time to realize its import, as my fiancee and I were busy screwing like pornstars in the adjacent bedroom, the noise of which drowned out (heh heh) the sound of our life becoming a living hell.
Finally, my fiancee heard the sound of running water over her own screams. This brought an abrupt end to some really, really good sex, and signaled the beginning of a really, really shitty day.
Entering the bathroom, we noted the thick sheets of water streaming down all four walls. Our reaction was animated. While I began sopping up the copious amounts of water on the floor with towels (a futile gesture, but it was the best I could come up with at the time), my fiancee called up our building manager, who did not answer. So she called our sup. Luckily, he was there, and hauled his meth-dealer-looking ass down the hall to check the problem out. A quick look at our bathroom and the fiendish look of unholy wrath on my fiancee's face sent him packing upstairs to check out the upstairs neighbour's apartment.
For brevity's sake, for the rest of this post, I'll be referring to my fiancee as "Kym," and my upstairs neighbour as "
Die, you fuck." My sup. will be known as Meth-Dealer. Whether this description is accurate or not, I really wouldn't know; I just smoke grass. While it may be unfair to categorize him as a vendor of hard drugs, well, I don't really give a shit, so we'll go with that anyway.
Die, you fuck's apartment was apparently a real sight. I think Meth-Dealer's description included an estimated measurement of about 3 inches of water thoughout the apartment. My reaction, from a very shortsighted point of view, was, "Good." At least he was going to have some hell to go through too. So I hoped, anyway. In vain, as it turns out. Meth-Dealer gave the complex's repair crew a call, and they were on site pretty damn quickly, I must say. Enouraging response time. That was not to last, but more on that later.
While a team worked upstairs in
Die, you fuck's apartment sucking up the water with ShopVacs, another fellow came on down to give us a hand. In addition to the bathroom, we had some minor leakage in the bedrooms, some major leakage in the storage closet, and wet spots beginning to show in the plaster ceiling above the dining room and kitchen.
It should be mentioned briefly at this point that our daughter, let's call her "Maeve," was immediately vacated to my mother's house. With several buckets set up in the bathroom, and more to come, it seemed the thing to do.
The one guy assigned to dealing with our apartment took a quick look around, took out some of the collapsing ceiling tiles in the bathroom, and pierced a hole in the ceiling above the living room, so that the water could drain before being absorbed into the drywall. One hole, about the size of a dime. This, we were told, would be sufficient.
To gloss over some details for a second here, we emptied the storage closet, soaked up the water there (with towels; ShopVacs were apparently at a premium that day and could only be spared to save
Die, you fuck's stuff), finished up in the bathroom, and set up a couple buckets where they appeared to be necessary. Our building manager finally deigned to show up, with some useless noises about taking care of it, and then quickly got the fuck out of there.
Shortly after the departure of the repair guy, we started to really look at some of these wet spots in the ceiling plaster. They looked pretty damn wet, man. Now, I'm not much of a handyman. I wish I was, but I'm really more of a nigger-rigger. But I know common sense when I see it. So, following the repair guy's example, I grabbed a screwdriver, climbed up on a chair, and pierced a hole where the largest wet patch appeared to be. This resulted in a stream of water shooting from the ceiling with the force of a garden hose,
directly in my face.Kym's got good reflexes. She had a bucket there pretty quickly to catch the excess drywall-smelling water that didn't get absorbed by my clothes and hair. That first 5-gallon bucket filled up pretty quickly, so we changed it, and luckily, only another 3 gallons came out. Of that hole. Over the next couple days, about half a dozen other holes were pierced to let out other, smaller pockets of water trapped in the ceiling. Only constant vigilance on Kym's part kept these leaks from pouring down on our stuff. She single-handedly saved the bookshelf and a number of other items prone to water damage. Actually, as far as our personal stuff goes, none of it was really touched, so on that front, we were pretty lucky.
Meanwhile,
Die, you fuck returned home to find an apartment almost completely dry. After sucking up the water, the repair guys installed some industrial fans to finish drying it all off. So far as
Die, you fuck was concerned, the whole thing wasn't really that big of a deal; a little bit of humidity, and the hose had to be replaced on the washing machine.
Not a god damned thing of his was the least bit damaged. I can only hope that one day he is raped by a rabid, well-endowed rhinoceros.
Since then, we've had all the thrills of industrial dehumidifiers running 24/7 in the middle of the summer (the electricity's on my dime, of course), giant holes ripped in the ceiling to allow more air circulation, and of course, dealing with insurance companies, as well as cheap and reticent landlords who seem to resent that we find the situation inconvenient. Because, clearly, this is all our fault; I mean, we only notified them immediately and did most of the work of limiting the damage. That's all. Naturally, we should be the ones to get
fucked in the ass with a sharp rusty shard of metal over all of this. Clearly.
Now we get to wait while
Die, you fuck's insurance company battles it out with our landlords to see who's paying for this, who's doing the repairs, and finally, the one I'm currently most concerned with, who the fuck is paying
me for this?
"Not I," said the insurance. "Not I," said the landlord. Yeah, we'll just fucking see about
that.
Three fucking weeks it's been now. Every time we get an estimate of how long this is all going to take, I swear to fucking god they add another week. It looks like they're going to have to replace the entire ceiling in the dining room, kitchen and living room. Naturally, we'll have to vacate the premises for the duration of the operation. That can't happen, though, until everything's dried out, which is taking a remarkably long time. See, happily coincidental to this debacle was a 2-week-long rainy spell, driving the humidity level outside to, well, a really, really high, uh, point. And of course we can't forget the
construction holiday. The construction holiday is a 2-week period in late July where Quebec construction workers get to take a break from their busy schedule of sitting on their fucking asses.
The final tally (so far) is that it should all be done by some time in mid to late August. Which is not bad, considering that this happened in fucking
June. Still don't know who's paying me for this bullshit. Still dealing with a fiancee who's half-hysterical with how a-fucking-noying this is. She's pretty high strung, you see, and sometimes deals with crises in a less-than-heroic fashion. I try to be a little more stoic, and simply wish horrible things on the parties I consider responsible for my own discontent.
Die, you fuck!!!
