Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Yesterday was a strange day full of ups and downs. It began on an unpleasant note. We could not use the kitchen sink because the pipes under the sink were leaking and a flood spread all the way across the floor. Bruce had to mop it up when he woke up at 5 in the morning, because the basin we put underneath the pipe was overflowing. A few hours later when I got up, the basin was overflowing again, and the linoleum was soaked. Water was spread across the floor and even reached the door of Jason’s bedroom. So, I’d made frantic forays downstairs to the superintendent, begging him to come and help.

Now, technically, he doesn’t have to do a thing. We live in a co-op so he’s only responsible for the common areas. If a leak comes down to our apartment from upstairs, it is his job to repair the damage, yet he has often been extremely slow to respond to requests to plaster our bathroom ceiling. We once had a gaping hole in our ceiling for well over a year because he just could not be bothered to come and work on it, and after a while I gave up trying. It took a great deal of persistence to finally get him to come up and seal the hole.

So, I didn’t feel particularly sympathetic to him just because he wasn’t really obligated to fix our leaking faucet. Besides, our apartment is directly over the Board president’s, and that gentleman doesn’t hesitate to complain if something from our apartment bothers him. Once he sent Stanley up to put little felt pads on the bottom of our kitchen chair and table legs, because the slight noise of our chairs being moved disturbed him. Truly, I would not want to put this man in bed with a pea under his mattress!

So I knew that if he got any water coming down from our apartment into his, he would be shrieking at Stanley to do something about it. Armed with that knowledge, I enlisted his wife in the campaign to get Stanley to fix the leak.

It must have worked because Stanley showed up at ten this morning in a totally surly mood. I didn’t realize that he would have to get all the way under the sink to fix it and install a new faucet, so I didn’t remove all the stuff from underneath it when he told me to. He threw everything out onto the floor, and then crawled under the sink. He wouldn’t speak to me and he went in and out of the apartment without saying a word. That’s his typical behavior but this time I sensed there was more anger behind it than simple indifference.

When he was finished, he left without even telling me he was done. I was left with the dilemma of deciding whether or not he deserved a tip. I don’t feel he deserves it, because he did not have to help out yet he agreed to, but then he was obnoxious about it. However, in pragmatic terms, it’s better to catch flies with honey, only in this instance the sweet stuff is green, begins with an “M”, and is not found in beehives.

Once Stanley left, I cleaned up the mess. There were sopping wet shirts and socks we’d left under the sink planning to use them as cleaning rags. But we’d never used them, so I felt no guilt about tossing them out. The rock salt I bought so I could scatter it like Janey Appleseed when I went out on icy days had fused together into one solid and useless lump, so I chucked that too. I tossed the water-damaged items also. I saved the sponges, since they’re supposed to get wet anyway, and left the detergent stains on the dark linoleum, to be mopped up another day. One thing I can say in favor of a leaky faucet, it forced us to mop the kitchen floor.

Once the entire cleanup was done, Jason and I headed out to the Museum of Natural History.