Sunday, November 2, 2008

I'd rather shower with a garden hose.

On September 10th I wrote about my apartment and concluded with "...but I'll save the shower story for another time." If you have been paying attention to my blog, then you may have noticed that I never followed up on that promise. There is a very good reason for this: I'm not ready to find the humor in the situation yet.
From day 1, showering at my apartment has been...well...bad. The shower is just in the middle of the bathroom, the water pressure is terrible, and (worst of all) the water is rarely warm. Rarely. In the first two months of living here I have had less than 10 warm-water showers, and by "warm" I mean "scalding". Basically I either freeze or boil my skin off.
I have tried different strategies to remedy this situation: showering at different times of the day, turning the air conditioner off 20 minutes before taking a shower, going for a jog right before, etc. with varying levels of success. Some days it's not too bad, and some days I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of people have it a lot worse than this, just to keep from crying.
After a couple months of this I finally had enough and I emailed a CTLC coordinator to see if there was something I could try to do about it, and he told me to ask my school.
I asked my contact teacher about it and she sent the maintenance man up to check it out. Now, if you recall, I have had a handful of warm showers, which means that sometimes it works. Of course, it decided to work when the maintenance man came. You should have seen this man demonstrating how a shower works: "turn this way, warm...turn this way, cold" while making me feel the water, Helen Keller-style.
He chuckled to himself as he left (can you blame him?), and I'm certain that it took all of 4 hours for everyone in the school to know all about it. I was completely enraged by this situation because, not only is nothing going to change, but also I look like a total moron.
The shower has been working slightly more consistently this last week, so maybe somehow the damned thing fixed itself...but only time will tell....

1 comment:

kevin said...

HAHA This is a funny story! I think it's even more hilarious that he happened to come when it was working. I'm sure that it was embarrassing, but you gotta admit, it is pretty funny and one day you will look back and laugh on it.