I had a pretty good birthday yesterday. The good wishes started on Sunday when several people at church gave me cards. One couple I am particularly fond of presented me theirs personally instead of setting it on the table where cards are usually left for people to pick up. He always calls me "kiddo." "Happy birthday tomorrow, Kiddo," he says. "You are going to be 21, right." We both laughed and I said, "Yeah, times 2."
On of my friends sent me a bouqet of very fragrant roses to the office. They make the office smell soooo good. We went to dinner last night with my in-laws, my best friend and her husband. That was loads of fun. The food was soooo good. There was no room for the free birthday dessert, so we didn't even ask for it. In hindsight, I wish we had and brought it home. I just love their white chocolate raspberry cheesecake. As it is, we still brought leftovers home. I had a captain's platter, which consisted of four succulent broiled scallops, three large crisp fried shrimp and two large fillets of parmesan crusted tilapia. MMMMMmmmmm. It was a really good time.
I was a little disappointed that not one of the kids called. I did hear from my sister and two of my brothers and my sister-in-law. All-in-all, it was a good day.
I needed a good day after the weekend we had. The tech area at work is in shambles at the moment. The employees called us Saturday morning to let us know we had no hot water at work. The cold was running, so John didn't sweat it too badly. We came up in the early afternoon, right before the store actually closed, with a space heater in hand and aimed it toward an outside wall where the water pipes froze last year. The landlord always hires the absolutely cheapest people to fix things and last year he didn't bother fixing it right when it froze then, apparently. At that time, his solution was to put a vent in the wall to help heat get up in there. It only took about 10 minutes of the space heater blowing before it thawed, and started spewing inside the wall, running out of that little vent and all over my tech room floor. We scrambled to get the boxes of paper and the computers up off the floor. It took John about 45 minutes to mop up the lake that it caused while I called someone for help.
I told the building manager I didn't want that same plumber out there because he obviously doesn't fix things right. She said she calls who the landlord tells her to call. I offered her my cell phone number so she could call me back as soon as she got hold of someone, but she said she was driving and didn't have the time to take it down. So I hung up with her and I called the landlord, who happens to live in balmy Florida now. I told him that I didn't want that same guy, and he said it was probably the only person he could get to come out on the weekend. Unfortunatlely, the whole building is on the same water line so the tennant in the apartment at the end would be without water all weekend if we waited until Monday, and that wouldn't be acceptable.
About 10 minutes later, someone shows up banging on the door. He says he's there about the broken water line, so we let him in. THANKFULLY, it's not the same guy that the landlord normally calls. I go back into the back office to deal with some other things while John deals with the contractor, who assesses the situation and tells us he's got his plumber coming over soon. Not long after the contractor's plumber gets there, the OLD plumber shows up. He's upset because he got called out to the job and someone else was already there. I'm saying, "Thank God," someone else showed up first.
After all is said and done, they discover that a huge part of the problem is when this old plumber (who, it turns out, the other plumbers in town refer to as Red Green because the guy has actually duct taped a water pipe before), when the old plumber replaced the water heater a couple of years ago, instead of cutting off the old line and tapping it into the new line he had to put in to connect to the new water heater, he simply shoved the pipes up into the ceiling, which put a bend in the pipes that run along the very-poorly insulated outside wall. Where the down pipe bows it now *touches* the outside wall, and picks up the frigid air and freezes.
We now have new water lines in - really cool rubber hose kind of lines that will swell four times their size before they break so the risk of bursting when they freeze is minimal. The new guy also put some of that gray foam stuff around the pipe so it's insulated. The old plumber last year just tore some of the insulation out of the wall and stuffed it around the colder area, basically rearranging the fiberglass insulation.
I still have a hole in my wall where the paneling was taken down to access the pipes. The contractor is supposed to be in today to finishe fixing it, and then we can put our tech room back in order.
The building manager came by yesterday while I was out to the bank. Apparently she's mad, too, because I called the landlord directly and he yelled at her because she called someone besides the guy he normally calls. These people also own a few Subway restaurants around here and apparently they've had some other plumbing issues because of this old guy. If she would have just told me that she had someone else she could have called in instead of telling me she calls whoever the landlord says to call, I'd have never bothered calling the landlord. John told her that's the reason I called the landlord. She sounded like she couldn't deal with it right away and was going to call the same old guy in. Now I'm waiting to hear back from the landlord and get chewed out for it. I'm wondering if his plumber didn't bill him for the call. I'm going to tell the landlord if he wouldn't hire the cheapest guy in town every time it would actually save him money because he wouldn't have to constantly have things redone.
Anyway, thanks to those of you who offered me birthday wishes. It was nice to have a good day in the midst of all that chaos.
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