Yes, thats right. My ceiling began caving in several weeks ago. It started in the hallway first, little chunks of drywall giving away half heartedly in order to let the steady stream of water coming from my upstairs neighbor's washing machine create nice little puddles on my carpet. Naturally, seeing this problem myself and my roommates contacted our maintenance people pronto. They arrived several hours later and weirdly did not share my concern for the fact that water seemed to be ruining my apartment (as this has happened before we thought they might be more proactive about it). But no, they merely checked out the problem, got the stream of water to seemingly stop and went along their merry way promising to be back the next day for further observation.
Unfortunately for us, the next morning brought further destruction. Upon waking we found the entire ceiling above our kitchen area to be bulging with (what we hoped) was clean water. Another emergency call brought maintenance men out to carve a HUGE whole into the ceiling. Again, very unconcernedly. They bid us goodbye once again and promised to be back the following Monday with drywall to patch up the gaping hole.
MONDAY!? That was 3 days away! What if we had been planning a fancy, tea cup drinking, sophisticated hat wearing party for that weekend? We weren't, but WHAT IF WE WERE? How could we possibly be respected as denizens of class with wires hanging from the ceiling threatening to electrocute anyone who came too close? (okay no wires were hanging ) What if President Obama (who happened to be in town that day) was riding in his limo, and despite excellent car service experienced a flat tire? What if it happened right outside my apartment and because of recent storms his cell phone service was down and had no choice to knock on my door and ask to use my telephone while unabashedly drinking lemonade and waiting for a ride? WHAT WOULD HE THINK about the giant hole in my ceiling?! I wouldn't be able to take the judging!
Luckily (for me and our great country) none of this actually happened. Though I could have probably given him some good advice on how to manage the oil spill. (after all if James Cameron can then why not me?) But the point is this- our apartment people throughly disregarded the fact that we might have to entertain very important people over the weekend and even if I spent most of my days off in my pajamas ordering in pizza I'M a very important person and would definitely appreciate a little sympathy.
All joking aside, the hole for the most part didn't bother me much. Of course I ended up having to live with it for over 2 weeks so perhaps what they say is true; familiarity breeds tolerance.
