Fire Day

Been itching to blog about last Friday, or in my world, Fire Day.

Flashback a few days. As is the norm these days, my wife and I keep a rather busy schedule which often deters us from cleaning our Crash Pad. Once the bald spots reappeared on my head and in my stomach lining, my trusty wife took action.

So, the kitchen is clean. All the dishes. I missed the bathroom, but I replaced the cat-devastated mini-blinds with some savvy curtains throughout the house while juggling laundry.

Wednesday. My wife notifies the maintenance personnel at our apartment complex that both our sink and toilet are leaking. Something I've been meaning to report for about...oh say5 months now. Go Green, Planet! Or whatever the fad is at the moment...

Mind you, I was a Maintenance Overseer for nearly four years. One thing I know, plumbing is absolutely without argument the easiest task in home/building repair. It's easier than painting. By far. I would have loved to have fixed it myself, but I can't feasibly turn off everyone's water.
Hey, whatever. After all, easier than plumbing, is having someone ELSE fix it. Right?

We get home that night. The sprayer's gone, as is the hookup to the dishwasher. What the crap!?
Nothing I can do about the sprayer. I mend the dishwasher without complaint. I'm too embaraassed of my missing the bathroom cleaning before our visit.

Friday at my job. The 1800 rolls are due/done today. They are being picked up by truck at around 1:30. So, taking this order and all the jokes I've been the butt of quite personally, I work through my break and choose to work through my 12-12:30 lunch to get the order out barely on time. Honestly, I had it wrapped at exactly 1:30, just as the truck honked. As I zipped off the production floor, I yelled over the din: "I'm goin' to lunch!" Magneato is like: "No you're not." Seeing how he's always joking around at my expense, I quickly dispensed with the banter, and WENT TO LUNCH.

I get back from lunch, five minutes early. Magneato is waiting. Risking my wrath and the structural integrity of his skeletal system, he confronts me about my "insubordination." I chose to "work without lunch" and UPS comes at 3:30 so we need to hurry for the end of the day rush. Also, I came in at 6:30am for overtime, like I said I would, instead of 6 or 7am--apparently the only options (and they weren't accepting 7). I can't be making my own schedule. Question: If I HAD taken lunch, wouldn't the 1800 shipment have been delayed? And, two, wouldn't that have cost time from the rest of the orders for UPS? I worked through regular lunch to save the day. Not to starve. I get even MORE pissy when I'm hungry, as if you can imagine that.

Flabbergasted at first, I said nothing. I recall nodding in acquiescence at the end of his soap-boxing. He hasn't been at work since Friday. I'm confident I didn't harm him. I actually remember the incident ( a good sign), I'm not in jail again, and I'm still employed. Besides, he was scheduled for vacation. But the memory is a bit fuzzy. He came close. Chalk it up to learning; I'll never do it again. For Damn sure.

At home, I'm all frown and furrow when the Mrs. gets home. She pries it outta me. Only, this time, rather than pointing the errors in my reasoning and siding with my enemy, she agrees that we should kick his miserable ass! I had to grin. It feels so good to be understood. Of course, we'll do no such thing. It's just that some people eat, some people drink, some people smoke, some people rage, and some people (who have the time and energy, which I didn't--in spades--that night) blog.

Friday night. After 9 pm. My beloved goes to activate the dishwasher. We've been eating out all week, so it's taken the week to fill the thing. She reaches under the sink to get the dishwasher soap and water pours out.

Here's the thing: it was the faucet that had been leaking that precipitated our call. The faucet. Leaking into the basin. If you put the faucet over the drain, you didn't even have to deal with the annoying pinging sound at night.

So, water. Pouring out. All the pots and pans. Tupperware, baking dishes. They're brimming over. ALL of them. Did I lose it? It was Friday night after a helluva long, arduous week. I had TWO shots of tequila on top of exhaustion. I would have laid down in the puddle. Speaking of which, why was it BROWN? My cute, petite little shortcake, on the other hand... Holy Fallout.
Rightly so.

The emergency maintenance man swings by after an urgent call. He comes to the same diagnosis as I did. The pipes weren't soldered right. Now, what I didn't ask is: why in the Hell were the pipes soldered in the first place? He was swapping a faucet!! What an ASS! Worse, he soldered UNDER the shut off valve! Seriously. Was he toking up in our apartment before he began? So there's no way the guy can can fix it until morning and no way we can shut it off until then either. Thankfully, we didn't have to miss class Saturday morning because of it. Apartment maintenance has a key.

Of course, as if it needs saying, I didn't finish my homework.

Now, we have a kitchen riddled with pots, pans and so on. We have difficulty making time for regular dishes with a dishwasher. Hell, I feel that I NEED blogging as therapy, and I gotta piece together my posts over several days. Now, we have every pot and pan dirty.

Oh. And then there's the toilet... Never mind, I can fix it myself.