Alexia's Ark

Did you miss me yesterday? Well, I was at home, suffering through daytime television and afraid to take a shower. It's a long story.

And it goes something like this. Saturday afternoon, I came home to find my front door mat all squishy and water slowly moving across the floor. It was coming from my storage closet, which also houses the gas and electric meters and the breaker boxes. I freaked out. The first thing I did was roll up my rug and stash it in the corner. Thankfully, it hadn't been hit. But I could see the water flowing. I opened up the storage closet door and freaked out some more. All my stuff is stored in cardboard boxes, because I am a genius. I called the landlord, who acted like he couldn't understand what I was trying to tell him. In his defense, I was freaking out. Totally useless. His daughter-in-law came over and took control of the situation, while I helplessly wandered around, picking up clutter. I pulled almost everything out of the closet and we found the source of the water.

Water was pouring out of a silver box in the wall, which ended up being the conduit box for the electricity. That means that wires from the street go through a big pipe into this box, then into the rest of the building. So, see, water was coming through from the storm drains (because rain + snow = flooding), through a break in the ConEd pipes, into my apartment. At a steady rate. Firemen were called. For some reason, five of them, with axes and things, came stomping and splashing into my living room, while I attempted to push water away from my couch. Go, linoleum! They turned off our power and called ConEd. Then everyone else called ConEd some more. Then the landlord's daughter-in-law showed more ingenuity than I could have possibly mustered at the time. She had her young son fetch two buckets, unscrewed the broom handle from the broom, and used it and the towels to mop up the floor while her son started the process of catching the water and dumping it. When they left, I had a dry and somewhat clean floor, most of the room had been moved into the kitchen, and I was left alone to empty the buckets.

The good news is that the distance from the storage closet to the storm drain right outside my front door is only about ten feet, but the bad news is that while it rained, and for two hours after, the rate of filling the buckets was one every four minutes. When it finally stopped around 7 pm, I was ecstatic. I lit a bunch of candles, ordered dinner, read by candlelight, then took a nap until about 10. ConEd hadn't shown, but I thought they might, so I stayed up. Good thing, too, because around 1 am, it started again. It was pouring outside, and it didn't let up for hours. The last few drips came in around 7 am. I figure that I emptied those buckets about 90 times, that round. My back hurt so much. Every time I got up to change the bucket, I would think, "I can't do this anymore, I'm losing my mind." As I got more and more tired, the candlelight played tricks on my mind, and I started seeing things out of the corners of my eyes. I had a lot of time to think, although most of it was consumed by one song going over and over and over, and I came up with this analogy: Imagine you're in a rowboat in the ocean, and it has a small hole in it. In order to keep from sinking, you have to bail it out every four minutes. That's all you can do. Bail, wait, bail, wait, bail. No end in sight.

Jump ahead to ConEd telling me they've fixed it. Well, they leave, it starts to rain again, and the damn thing is still leaking. Just dripping though, so I never need to change the bucket, but I call to see if they're going to come back and at least put the box cover back on, and they tell me first available crew. That was around noon on Sunday. I sat home all day yesterday, afraid to take a shower for fear they would show up and I wouldn't hear them. They never showed up. I hate them so much.