I knew when I first rented here that problems would arise. I knew this because I had read about so many other people have problems with their apartments here. It was statistically impossible for nothing to go wrong. Having nothing go wrong in this country would be like spontaneously turning into an apple pie and then eating yourself. So the inevitable time has come for me bear the brunt of the invisible but ubiquitous force that insures that all ex-pats must deal with problems in their domiciles.

My less than stellar Saturday morning sleep was destroyed by a constant dripping sound. At first I got up to go to the bathroom, as normal in such situations. Then when I was dazedly walking back to my room, I noticed a long wet tear in my ceiling with a few heavy dripping spots at the one end. At first I was obviously irritated, mostly because I knew that this tear in my ceiling was actually a large bovine, who had suddenly materialized in my apartment and taken a nice big steaming shit on my lap. So I went upstairs to see what the hell was going on.

It was 9 am. The first doorbell was met with the typical moaning of unintelligible Chinese behind a still shut door. The door didn’t open, but I heard the second door close. I definitely woke the guy up, but because he didn’t have the common courtesy (in China yeah right!!) to open the door, I gave him an assault of the sonic variety courtesy of the ridiculously deafening doorbells that all the apartments in the building are equipped with. After that he did open the door and I tried to explain what was going on in my tired Chinese. As was expected, he had no idea, didn’t care, or both, because to his freshly woken knowledge there was no leaks on his floor, and he wasn’t running any water. I apologized and went to inform the building management, who seem to be open even on Saturday mornings.

Too bad for the prick upstairs because the security guard came up to check things out and went to the guy’s apartment that was directly over mine. Again he was woken, this time his wife was there talking, and a nice little heated exchange opened up. The laughing that occurred at the end of the exchange informed me that nothing was going to happen at this point.

The security guard disappeared back down to the management office, and I went to call my landlord so she could get on it ASAP. Luckily for me, my landlord, despite being a five foot tall middle aged lady, transforms into the terminator when it comes to any issue that puts her prized investment into jeopardy. She would be over in one hour I was told.

I highly doubt that it was someone who left their water on or something dumb like that. The most probable culprit was the absolutely piss poor quality that goes into Chinese buildings. Really, what can you expect when you pay your workers $50 a month, or sometimes nothing at all! During my travels throughout the country I’d have to say 75% of the hotels I’ve stayed in have had pipes burst while I was staying there. I’ve only been to about 5 hotels, and only 3 of them had leaks, so that statistic really only reveals that I’m a horrible mathematician, but still.

My landlord arrived 30 minutes after I called, and proceeded to go upstairs to see what the problem was, and back down management to see what was being done about it. Eventually a large congregation of people formed outside my door, the penisface from upstairs and his wife, my landlord, the building manager, the janitor, the security guy, and some other random people who apparently had nothing better on a saturday morning than take a peek into the foreigner’s room. After about 15 minutes of high speed discussion I couldn’t understand, everyone left except my landlord, who then explained that know one actually knows where the water was coming from, and there was nothing we could do about it right now. She did however give me the sick satisfaction of knowing that the dink from upstairs’ place was actually hit pretty hard, and it was coming from somewhere in the vicinity of his water heater. Finally she made sure that there wasn’t any other leaks or problems and told me not to worry about it, because it wasn’t my problem. That was good enough for me, because as long as I didn’t have to deal with anything else that morning I had more important affairs to attend, namely getting back to my dream where my money printing factory was about to open up. I was incredibly lucky however that the leak didn’t hit the second bedroom with all my computer tools in it, or there’d be hell to pay. Now I’ll have to use protection.

The great thing about all this, is that I can be assured there will now be an incessant stream of construction noise coming from above me trying to solve the problem. Which is great really, because I was getting unnerved with all the peace and quiet I had to deal with after the other people above me just recently finished tearing out their tiles and putting in hardwood flooring.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a factory opening to attend to.

Filed under: dragons