Apartment Woes #... what, are we at 27 now?

Sunday night I was doing laundry while watching a movie that I rented. I heard the water drain out and it sounded a little louder than normal… but I assumed I had left the door open and didn’t think much of it. So, later I went to exchange the loads and I got within 10 feet of the washer and my feet squished in the carpet… there was water everywhere!!!!!

I called the emergency maintenance line, because I wasn’t quite sure what to do… it was a pager, so I left my number. Thankfully, it was my very last load… so it didn’t completely piss me off. (Although water covering 1/3 of my apartment didn’t make me feel like a million bucks either…. But whatever). I waited and waited and waited. No call back. So I tried again, thinking if this truly was an emergency situation, I would be screwed. Again, I waited and never received a call back. So, I called my good buddy who is a pretty handy guy and asked if I had to stay up and worry about my water situation, or if I could just go to bed. It seemed like by going to bed, I was turning my back to a potentially huge smelly mess. He assured me, that since they didn’t call me back, that I should just go to bed (the water will be there in the morning, after all) and to have them come in first thing and make sure to do a mildew and mold treatment. So, to bed I went.

Sure enough, the next morning, the water was still there and had even seeped out into the main hallway. There was about a six foot half circle of water surrounding my door!! I am sure my neighbors were impressed.

On my way to the office I called the apartment office and of course, they don’t get there until 8:30, so I left a message (not a nice one…) and told them to call me back ASAP.

Take a step back in time with me for a sec, to remember all the other issues I had with my apartment… my shower leaking, my dishwasher didn’t work, my garbage disposal didn’t work, when water drained from my sink it came out from underneath of my refrigerator (this one totally grossed me out), my bathroom sink leaked… I could name a few more, but you get the point. They did fix my dishwasher and garbage disposal… but beyond that, they come to my apartment when I bitch, “look into my claims”, say that things really don’t leak (even though my carpet was wet from the shower), and even though they are supposed to follow up, I never hear from them about the issue again. Further, the last time they were in my apartment, every light was on when I came home and the door was unlocked… both of those things pissed me off more than you can imagine…..

For the most part, I have just become fed up with trying to call and explain things, and certainly fed up with having them come in to my apartment, dirty stuff up with their muddy shoes and handyman waste, while nothing is getting taken care of. So, I don’t continue to stay on them until things are completely fixed. Actually, why should that me my job, though??? Shouldn’t I report something and it should just get fixed?!?!?

With this issue though, I wasn’t nice and I definitely didn’t let things just drop. Additionally, while I had those bitches on the phone, I told them about everything else that hadn’t been fixed.

One more thing too, the reason why the water drained into the apartment in the first place, is because the hose for the washing machine was the wrong hose… so the maintenance man told me to go to Lowe’s to pick the right one up. As you can probably imagine, this set me off. THAT IS WHY I RENT, YA JACKASS. I don’t stop at Lowes. I stop at the mall or at the tanning salon or at the gym…. I stop at places like that because I don’t have the added financial responsibility of owning a damn home. YOU STOP AT LOWE’S YOUR DAMN SELF!!!!

So, the current status is that my carpet is dry now (thanks to a huge blower that kept me up most of Monday night) and apparently they put a mildew/mold treatment down before they re-glued my carpet. I am not sure if the washer is fixed yet or not, because once again the follow up call didn’t happen. I did get two other calls though on Tuesday night at about 7 and another on Wednesday at about 4 in the afternoon… asking me if I had just paged the emergency line. I let them know that I did… on SUNDAY. I also had to move a bookshelf (that they moved out of the way) all by myself, because apparently they don’t know how to put things back where they found them. I moved the book shelf, right after I picked up all the carpet cuttings and scrubbed their muddy shoe prints off my bathroom floor.

Good times. My lease is up in September; I will be sending hate mail until then.

On an unassociated home front note… my TV in my bedroom stopped working back in the beginning of February. I was really upset by this, because I sleep with the TV on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t upset enough to take my cheap ass to Best Buy to get a new TV… Well like three weeks after it stopped working, I think I lost power in my apartment for a minute, and it started working again… (this is not an old TV, there are no problems with the picture or anything… so why it stops working, I have no idea). So, it worked for about two weeks, and then stopped worked again. Knowing that power helps it “reboot”, if you will… I reset all of my fuses to jump start it. No luck. So, I unplugged it and moved on with my life. Last night, as I was deep cleaning the mess from the maintenance crew, I plugged it in to give it a test. Sure enough, it works again! So, for approximately the next two weeks, I will be back to my normal sleep and news watching routine… and then it will die again. At least I can prepare myself for it!