Hayley's Comet

It turns out my shower has been leaking water into the apartment below me for the past six months.

I’ve had problems with my shower since I got here. Low pressure, no pressure, no cold water, no hot water, no water at all - you name it. They “fixed” the hot/cold water thing about three months ago and that’s when the problems really started. It turns out that every time I would take a shower, water was dripping in through a crack between the hot/cold handle and the wall. Oops!

Two somber maintenance men came to my door this afternoon and said, “May we talk to you for a minute, Miss?” Based on the way things have been going here, my first thought was, “what did I do now!” But their “somber” news was just that they needed to turn off my water for a few hours to fix the leak. After three people looked at it, one guy took the shower head and on/off thing out of the wall and fixed it, accidently cracking some of the tile around it along the way. Luckily he caulked it all up and it’s fine. They even sent a cleaning person in to mop up their muddy maintenance man footprints.

They told me that it should work fine, that I’ll still have hot water, etc. I’m skeptical. I also heard them tearing out and replacing the ceiling below me.

Who let this happen? The people below. They were always “noisy troublemakers” (maintenance man’s words, not mine!) so they apparently didn’t notice that their ceiling was about to cave in. I guess that’s his nice way of saying they were drunk or high 24/7. The occupants have since been evicted, hence the quiet. If these walls could talk, though…

This is a great metaphor of how things work in LA (and perhaps life). Nobody pays attention, things get shoved under the rug and no one gets clued in until parts of the ceiling cave in.