And You're Out

There is an apartment full of USAC students not far from where I live. They have maintenance issues all the time – in the beginning of the semester, for the first week they had no heat, no hot water, no internet, and the land line had been disconnected. They continue to have various problems. For example, if the heater is on in the main room and someone turns on lights in another room, the power goes off. Also, if the heater is on above low (which only warms up the apartment to approximately 50 degrees), all the power in the apartment shuts off. In fact, if you want to do anything involving being able to live normally, the power will shut off. Knowing the problems these residents have been having, I’ve always felt quite fortunate living where I do. Things tend to work, I get to shower when I want to, we can turn the heat on to a reasonable level, life is good. That is, until we lost almost all of our water pressure. Now, water only comes out of our faucets when it wants to; often, it will spurt out feebly for a moment or two and then stop completely. And water doesn’t even make it up to the shower head. We are forced to shower elsewhere or else suffer our own stink. Strike one. Then we realized that we had no hot water. I thought maybe this was because the low water pressure meant the hot water just never made it up all the pipes. This is not the case. We just have no hot water. Strike two. And then we discovered that our toilet was constantly flushing and would not stop no matter what we did, wasting our water and our money. Strike three. We’re totally out of the game.