Tessa's Ark

On Thursday, 8 October 2009, Varya and I were out with Tessa for some shopping. We were, in fact, buying a new mattress, because the cheapo mattress that came with the apartment was literally breaking apart. No, not for any particular reason. It was just breaking apart because it wasn't meant for people who weighed more than, say, 40 kilos each.Varya and I found an awesome -- and well, a little expensive -- mattress in a mattress shop nearby. We tested it by bouncing on it, and sitting on it, and even put Tessa on it to see her reaction. She liked it. This, we said, was The Mattress. The deal was done, and they were going to deliver it by 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

So far, so good.

We started off for home. Halfway there, a phone call comes through. Our landlord called to let us know that the neighbors downstairs were complaining about water leaking into their home from ours. We were rather surprised, and told him that it couldn't be our home, as we were always careful not to leave anything on or running.

When we got home, however, we opened the door and saw our entire apartment flooded. The floors were covered by an inch of water. It was incredible beyond belief! I'd never seen so much water on any floor! We sloshed around in stunned silence. Tessa, I think, was more curious and interested than we were -- she too had never seen water like this on the floor. I believe she was in a hurry to get down from Varya's arms and start exploring this strange, new phenomenon.

We called our landlord and demanded to know what was happening. He sent up some maintenance and security people -- they're nice that way! -- and we found out that part of our washing machine tap had broken off and bazooka-ed water all over the place. The drain, apparently, couldn't keep up with this new mega-influx of water and had given up early on. Nice. :-)

The neighbor from downstairs came up to take a look too, and he wobbled in astonishment. He took one look at the tap fitting and said that all the fixtures in these apartments were of inferior quality, and passed some juicy comments to the maintenance people. They, for their part, acknowledged that it wasn't our fault, and helped us mop and clean up the apartment. We had around ten people in here mopping, cleaning, flushing out water and generally drying the place up. In an hour, the apartment was nice and dry. We kept the airconditioners running on full power for a couple of days to complete the drying process, and hung out our wet stuff to dry in the sun.

The gentleman from maintenance in charge of our tap tried to get us to pay for it, but we refused outright. No negotiation on that one, we said. It was clearly a cheap fixture and absolutely not our fault. He had no choice but to change it for free.Things are now tight here. :-)