Apartment confessions

As faithful readers of this blog know, my landlord is evil. But here is what I have managed to do to the apartment in the space of three months:

• Somehow blow out the electrical circuit in the dining room.
• Break a large hole in the bathroom sink. My "dollar store" mirror fell off the wall. The mirror survived, the sink didn't.
• Accidentally spill some bleach on the arm of the evil sofa.
• Break away some of the plastic edging around the floor in the bedroom.

And the crowning achievement came one morning not long ago when we managed to damage the laminate flooring. 

The story starts weeks ago: the (cheap, old) plastic tubing for the water supply to the (ancient) washing machine cracked. Since the evil landlord had attached the tubing to the water faucet with teflon tape instead of a clamp, I pulled the old tubing off but could not find the right sized clamp to attach new tubing. So I gave up and just started filling the washing machine by bucket from the tap. (In China, incidentally, landlords are not responsible for repairs in the way they are in Canada.)

Soaking wet husband & (cheap, crummy) broken tap

Then Ross arrived from Canada. One morning soon after his arrival, he bought some new tubing and started to attach it to the water faucet.  The entire faucet broke away in his hands and water started gushing out. I mean gushing.  He used all his strength to try and hold the water back, as he put it, like the Dutch boy at the dike, I threw random objects at him -- plastic bag? sock? broom handle? -- to try and plug the hole but the force of the water was too strong. Within seconds I knew i had to start mopping the floor because it was spilling out of the tiled area onto the laminate. We also knew that we had to find the water shut-off.  

Ross, operating from a Canadian perspective, told me to look all around the nearby area because the water shut off should be near the tap.  A full four minutes elapsed while I (a) tried to call my school "handler" on the phone, (b) tried to find the water shut off, (c) tried to rouse the neighbors to ask for help, and (d) tried to keep water off the laminate. I was literally running in circles. Meanwhile Ross was battling what looked like a fire-hose of water hitting his chest and face. I like to think that someone in the apartments across the way could see us through their windows. If they did, they must have been laughing til the tears ran down their cheeks.  It wasn't so funny for us, of course. "This can't be happening," we exclaimed. But it was.

I did understand that shutting the water off was the priority. So finally I abandoned the mopping, ran to the bathroom and found a water shut off for the entire apartment.  But by the time I got the water shut off, it was too late.  The laminate at one end of the living room showed unmistakable signs of swelling and curling. 

The landlord is still evil -- but there's not much to be said for me as a tenant!

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