32. Swing and a miss (unedited)

I thought about writing my blog last night, then I got distracted and never got around to doing it. Oh well, it's not as if anybody is keeping score.

So on Thursday night, after I wrote about my famous last words, I was getting ready to call it a night. I was still sitting at my computer when I heard a bizarre sound. It sounded like dripping in the bathroom. That made no sense, of course, because I hadn't been in the bathroom for over an hour.

Yes, there was dripping. There's a steam vent above my shower, and water was dripping out of it, into my shower. Not a good sign, I figured.

Not knowing what to make of it, I took a leak. The toilet was right there, after all, and I was due.

After washing my hands, I felt drips of water hit me on the head as I was drying my hands. Sure enough, water was now starting to drip out of the heat vent in the ceiling, too.

Within minutes I had a stream pouring out of the heat vent. I don't remember the sequence of events, but I managed to put a big plastic tub and my cooler on the floor of my bathroom to catch most of the water streaming down. I also called our emergency maintenance number and awoke one of the maintenance dudes, who probably wasn't happy to have to come to my building. I told him it seemed as if a pipe had burst. After calling it I figured it was more likely that something was overflowing in an apartment above me.

About 35 or 40 minutes later the dude arrived, took a look at what was going on and was a bit stunned by what he saw. I had already dumped the 30-gallon tub into my tub, as it was three-fourths full and I doubted I could have lifted it if I waited until it was completely full. Doing this meant that I had to get rained upon by the dirty water from the ceiling.

Within minutes maintenance guy returned from his investigation from the apartments above me. The person immediately above me had been asleep the entire time, and had no idea that water was pouring through the ceiling of her and/or his apartment. I was told the ceiling was in bad shape from all the water that had accumulated above it.

That's because the new guy, the retired racist who had just moved in at the beginning of the month, decided somewhere around midnight that a bath was a great idea. From maintenance guy's report, the racist had been in a fight and his face wasn't too pretty. He reeked of alcohol, too.

So it seems that he was rather drunk, wrote a check his ass couldn't cash and decided to take a bath at midnight. Yeah, when I'm drunk, a bath is the first thing I think of.

The only problem with his logic was that he hadn't banked upon passing out while his tub was filling. And there's the source of my precipitation.

I did some brief cleaning/drying/decontamination on Friday morning before taking a shower. Maintenance guy told me they'd be working on my bathroom, and the wet carpet outside it on Friday. Now I have holes in my ceiling, bits of plaster on the tank of my toilet and a musty smell in my apartment.

As maintenance guy pointed out at 1:45 a.m., it was a good thing I was still awake, otherwise it could have been a lot worse. He's probably right.

He also pointed out that the fiasco in my bathroom, a day after my apartment was burglarized, made for a pretty lousy week for me.

He was definitely right.