and my apartment floods, AGAIN.

8:49 AM on Saturday morning. I awake with a start for no apparent reason. I try to snuggle in bed for a bit longer, but the apartment, as per usual, is stifling (gotta love building controlled heat) and my phone is bleeping various alerts at me. I get up, head to the bathroom, and while I'm there realize that for some reason the water isn't working. Alarmed because of a weird incident the night before involving a leaking pipe that maintenance couldn't locate, I hop over to the kitchen to see if that faucet it also on the fritz.
Squish. 
I leap into the air in shock as my foot squelches into a soaking wet patch of carpet by the kitchen. The tile is strewn with debris and the under sink rug is also soaked. We've apparently had a little flood, and then all the water was soaked up by the living room rug. 


I wake my roommate up to alert her to the matter. She decides to wait until nine to call maintenance since it doesn't seem to bad, and eventually comes into the living room to check the damage.


She connects that someone must already know about it if the water has been turned off, and goes outside to see if anyone's around. Several people are outside discussing our neighbor's flooded apartment (6 inches covering the whole place, yikes!) and how they're glad it's the only one. Becca gives them the bad news that we've been hit too, and while we stand there in our disheveled hair and pajamas, several men traipse around our apartment checking out the damage and growing more upset.


Joe the maintenance man is clearly stressed, but very nice and helpful. 


9:15 AM. I heat up sticky buns from my pastry class the night before, hoping I can foist the extras of on the various people working out this little plumbing problem.


An hour or so later, Joe has been joined by Billy and Cliff, the plumbers, who have cheerily gone about pulling out our stove, and ripping holes in both our kitchen wall and our bathroom. 


10AM. We talk at length with them about marijuana. Used only for medicinal purposes, mind you, in Joe's case (he has metastatic cancer). Billy regales us with a hilarious tale of confiscating his 14 year old sons weed, and then throwing it in a drawer at work, where it begins to call to him. So, he decides to smoke a bowl. Having not smoked weed since about 1984, he gets high, promptly freaks out and finds himself wandering through Walden Woods so no one will find him and suspect he's high.


10:30 AM. I decide Billy is my new favorite plumber. Becca and I leave the apartment since we can't do anything there but sit and stare at the mess while people come in and our of our place.


7 PM. My apartment is still in complete an utter shambles, as fans dry the floor, the stove is still chilling in the middle of our teensy kitchen, and our hall closet had to be empty into our rooms. Apparently, this snafu is going to take a few days to clear up. 


Side notes:
The plumber definitely uttered the trademark expression, "what's with that fackin' sweatshirt" (the Bostonian pronunciation of the F word), I love all the native handymen around here.
Billy and Cliff seemed to greatly enjoy the sticky buns, woohoo culinary class.


On a final note, I'd like to point out that this is the fourth flooding experience I've had to survive in my living space since college. Twice in one dorm my room flooded during extreme weather, once in my first apartment a water heater overflowed and flooded our apartment, and now this. (This is all notwithstanding the time when a pipe problem caused me to have to evacuate my first apartment while they jackhammered it in half to fix the pipes.) It's clear I'm the most common denominator in all this, whatever that means. . .