Haha! Yes! The bathroom celing collapsed! Funny story!
I live with my brother, my sister and a pot-smoking, twice-divorced 37-year old in an apartment building owned and maintained by Eastern Bloc immigrants, who are really pretty great; when we were signing the lease, we asked if there were any rules other than those stated that we needed to follow, and the landlord said no. Then the greasy real-estate guy said, "Huhuh! No loud parties!", to which the landlord replied, "Oh, no, do whatever you want!"
However, the problem is that the super is a bit...absentminded. During the summer, my sister noticed that there was a leak in the celing, and, being 25 and a responsible adult, decided not to do anything and left the apartment, which sat vacant for 2 weeks. When my brother and I got there, a giant paint-bubble had appeared. We immediatly call the super, who comes by, and then tells us that he's going to go upstairs and fix the leak. He leaves, and the leak stops. And then...he doesn't return.
The next day, the leak began anew, and we called him again. The day after that, the leak continued, unabaited, and we called him again. Five days and five calls later, my brother and I went to the main building to find, well, anyone who would actually do something. We found Konrad, a young Eastern European man who informed us that the super was on vacation. Ah. But Konrad could help us!
We walk Konrad up to the apartment and show him the bathroom. He reaches up, grabs the bottom of the paint bubble and tugs.
About 5 square feet of celing and wall collapse into (luckily) my bathtub, along with a fair amount of filthy water.
Konrad says, "Oh, fhaking sheet." I was actually kind of bothered that he didn't go to the trouble of cursing in his native tongue, so we wouldn't know how bad it was. He told us that he was going to go up, turn the water off, and then, 2 days later, come back and re-drywall and re-plaster the celing, and also do something about the large, visible molds which had formed. Then he left. Leaving 5 square feet of wall and celing in my tub.
Regardless, two days later, he did fix it, in what is definitely the most Eastern Bloc manner- he put a piece of drywall up on our celing, plastered the edges to the actual celing, plastered up the part of the wall that had fallen down, and then left. My celing now has a 3 foot section that is an inch higher than the rest and is brown.
This all adds to my premise that Konrad, the super, and indeed the entire management, believe that our building is actually a satellite of an Eastern Bloc nation; this is re-inforced by the frequent hot-water shortages and cutoffs, the lack of heat in 2 of the 5 bedrooms and the fact that, when we first moved in, someone had carved the words "MEAN PEOPLE" into my wall, with a knife, and the landlord actually pointed at it and chuckled.
Despite this, I really like my landlord and building; it's like Balki from Perfect Strangers magically wandered into Faulty Towers.
Things actually aren't as bad as they sound- for some reason, all of the bad things that happen to me are spectacularly bad, and thus make great anecdotes. The friends thing tends to elude me, however, because I dropped out of a fashion design school posing as an art school where I hated everyone and had no friends. In fact, I've done a count and realized that I haven't lived in the same city as more than 2 of my friends for more than three months out of the last 3 years.
Luckily, I'm going to get some dwarf hamsters.
EDIT: Whoa, looks like I'm going for some pretty rough chuckles nowadays.
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Topic: Nov 23, 2005 - FROM THE DESK of a reasonable man (Read 7218 times)