The Great Flood And Other Hyperbole

So over the weekend the radiator exploded in the apartment next to mine. Since that apartment is the model unit (oh, the actual irony!) that they show to potential renters, no one noticed this fact until Frank realized that half our apartment was under water. (I was back home visiting family at the time, but I probably wouldn't have noticed anyways. I'm oblivious like that.)

Incidentally, the call from Frank informing me of this fact was brilliantly dramatic:

Jason: Hello?
Frank: Jason?
Jason: Hey, what's up?
Frank: Disasters and tragedy!
Jason: Uhh, what happened?
Frank: There! Is water! All over the kitchen!
Jason: That accounts for disaster and tragedy?
Frank: Well it's other places too! Doom!

You can't fault the boy's ability to ratchet up the drama in any given situation.

I tracked down a number for him and Frank got a call in to the emergency maintenance people. Who at least got the water to stop flowing like a river into our house, but their overall solution to the problem was just to rip up all the carpet in Frank's room and the hallway. And then leave, with a vague promise to come back. At some point, maybe in the future. This was not comforting to me, especially after it took them 3 full months to replace the garbage disposal in the kitchen last year. We could live with that at the time, but we sort of need that room.

Because suddenly I had a displaced Frank in the living room and roughly half of our usual floorspace to work with. I don't know if I've mentioned it lately, but I own a lot of stuff. Consolidating all that crap into 1/2 the normal amount of space basically left us climbing over mountains of debris anytime we wanted to walk between two rooms in the house. The only saving grace is that Frank owns basically no furniture (a bed and a TV) so we didn't completely collapse in on ourselves. Still, by midweek it was like we were living in one of those pack rat homes that Oprah sometimes goes to, with the trash and old newspapers piled to the ceilings. We are not built for small locations. Or cleaning, for that matter.

And oh yeah, the smell. Dear God. Water is gross. Standing water that has festered under some carpet is horrible and leaves your apartment smelling like low tide on the Gulf Coast. Frank Febreezed every available surface in the house, I coated the entire building with air deodorizer, and you would still choke when you walked in the door. We spent the entirety of Tuesday night with all the doors and windows in the place wide open, just in case any robbers/vagrants/hippies from down the street felt like wandering in for a quick chat and/or theft of our lovely property.

Because it wasn't until Wednesday afternoon that they finally got around to actually repairing the carpet, and even that was done poorly. (Probably because I left them this horribly bitchy message on Tuesday after they failed for the second time to do what they goddamn said they would do and fix the crap they started.) They knocked over everything that was anywhere near the area they had to work on, didn't vacuum after they were done, and left tons of debris and excess carpet stuff all over Frank's room.

And the place still goddamn reeks.

Incidentally, we're moving in two months, the second my lease expires.

Anyone know of a nice house for rent?

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Y'all know that I hated my job, right? Well with the advent of this thing called the Internet, I have been able to apply for other jobs with surprising ease, although I've had very little overall success at getting chances to escape from my current hell.

That was until about a week ago, when I got an offer from a new place. New job, new title, new location, more money, and less chance that I would need to pick up someone's fur coat from storage as part of my college-degree-requiring job. I was ready to bolt like a ninja and told my boss so, to my utter delight. Getting a chance to finally tell off your boss is akin to winning the lottery in my mind. Luckily, I held off from going nuts right away, since she then immediately asked exactly how much money it would take to get me to stay on board, horrors be damned.

I worked it over in my mind and ran the figures to put a dollar value on exactly how much I disliked my current job, and came up with the amount of money I would need to make that feelings of hatred melt away in the face of wads of cash. The final figure I came up with was (only mildly) ludicrous, and I was pretty sure there was no way in hell they would be willing to throw enough money at me to make me stay, despite my total awesomeness at my job.

And then she matched it without blinking.

So yeah, hi. I'm staying where I am. And suddenly I have a way better outlook on employment.

Also soon: Richer than Astronauts!