Mar
23
A Series of Unexpected Expenditures
Author Andy L. | Filed Under Miscellaneous
We used to have Roman shades in our living room. You know what Roman shades are even if you don’t know what they’re called. Here’s a picture to help you out. Basically, a Roman shade is a series of pleats that collapse or expand from the bottom up as you raise or lower the shade. They look nice and are neither cheap nor ridiculously expensive, depending of course upon where you purchase them. Unfortunately, I have something else in my living room, two cats. My cats, as felines are wont to do, enjoy chewing on just about anything, paper, plastic, tin cans, and of course, string. Roman shades work on a fairly simple principle, there are n number of strings running vertically up the back of the shade through rings, then across the headrail through eye-hooks, where they are bundled together at one end and form the cord for manipulating the shade. Now imagine what happens when one, or more, of those strings is cut, or in my case, chewed through. Maybe one side of the shade goes up, or maybe both ends but not the middle, there are many possible permutations to this, depending on the number of strings that have been severed and the number that are still whole.
It would be rather stupid to just fix the shades (something that is actually pretty simple to do) and then rehang them because the aforementioned felines would just ruin them again. So, after restringing the shades, I hung them in the bedroom where they are no longer in danger. This means, however, that I need to buy new shades for the living room so that the people in the apartment building across the street can’t see what we’re eating for dinner and watching on TV. Of course, now there are restrictions: the replacement shades cannot contain any exposed string. Last I checked, they don’t make shades out of chain mail. We finally settled on roller shades that have a metal chain for raising and lowering the shade. After I put them up, we enjoyed a solid twenty minutes of watching the cats chew on the metal chain, thankfully to no effect. Round two to the ones with opposable thumbs.
However, the title of this entry contains the word “series,” so obviously there’s something else to talk about. What makes item number two so much more irritating than the shades, is that it was a toilet. Toilets should not break, and in fact, they rarely do. Typically, if there’s something wrong with your toilet, than there has always been something wrong with it. Most toilet issues can be solved easily as they usually involve one of the moving parts inside the tank. It takes about a minute to replace a decaying flap, adjust the length of the chain, or the position of the flushing arm. For something more serious, say replacing the entire flushing mechanism, it takes about twenty minutes. Clogs can be handled with a variety of tools, ranging from drain cleaner to plungers. What you can’t fix, and so of course is the problem I have, is a cracked bowl. We’re not talking something huge, like say, the crack in the Liberty Bell. No, we’re talking about a hairline fracture, not even visible when you look at the toilet. Of course, the bowl being completely empty all the time is a dead giveaway that there’s something wrong with the porcelain throne. This kind of problem is not fixable; you have to replace the toilet.
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, we’ve owned our condo for less than a year and the developer is still doing work in the building. We seem to be playing the game where they stall until I get frustrated enough to take care of the problem on my own. We’ve been playing this game for a couple months now. First, I called over to the management company and told them the issue. They sent their plumber out to take a look. He told me, “The toilet bowl is defective.” I’m ecstatic. Anyway, I then call the management company again (they never call me first, nor do they return phone calls) and ask what they’re going to do about it. “We’ll call the developer and see what they want to do,” is the answer. OK. A couple days go by, I call them again. “Still haven’t heard back from the developer. We’ll call again.” I’m thinking, thank god we have two bathrooms. Finally, they say they’ve ordered a new toilet and they’re going to come over and replace the broken one. When they finally do show up, they don’t have a new toilet with them because they want to check something else. As if it would magically have fixed itself. I’m sure there will be a different excuse next time.
I’m hoping that this time around, I won’t have to pay the expense of a new toilet. But I have no illusions that some other unforeseen issue isn’t right around the corner. After all, we just noticed that the washer fluid reservoir in the car is completely empty, even though I refilled it a week ago. The point is, there will always be something else. The number of “something elses” is proportional to the amount, complexity, and expense (typically, the more complex something is, the more it costs) of stuff you own. Like Murphy’s Law, unexpected expenditures are a fact of life, and sometimes it seems that you go from one issue to the next. Hopefully, you have enough squirreled away to cover whatever crops up next.
Comments
5 Responses to “A Series of Unexpected Expenditures”
Leave a Reply
Sell the cats, buy a new toilet… just my opinion.
“….so that the people in the apartment building across the street can’t see what we’re eating for dinner and watching on TV”
yeah….i’m sure those are things your most concerned about your neighbors seeing.
I’m just thinking maybe you don’t want your neighbors to see the tights you wear under your running shorts!
like ya miss ya hahahaha
Sell the cats!! How awful!!
Writing is a craft and you need to continue doing it to improve. So write another post already or you’ll get an incomplete this semester.