After the fridge went to wherever it is fridges go when they die, the internet joined it there. We didn't know what was going on with it (we'd been turning the modem on and off in hopes that we could resuscitate it but to no avail) until we saw a notice in our building that HOT, our internet provider, was having problems in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. We kept waiting for it to go back up but after a week and half we decided that it probably wasn't going to spontaneously recover. I called them up and told them that we still didn't have internet service, and no wonder- according to them, we don't exist. They couldn't find us by name, phone number or address. They had obviously missed us when they put the network back up seeing as we're ghost customers. I told my roommate about this and she went, “oh yeah, we had this problem before where they couldn't find us in their system.” To make a long story short, I don't know what she did but the internet came back after she spoke to them. Two weeks after it had gone down. She may have had to “explain” to them using very physical and graphic terms. I don't know what she did but it worked.
A few days after we lost the internet, I did laundry and realized that the bathroom was about to float away. There was a large pool of water on the floor and some ducks had taken to roosting in it. And the water wasn't coming from the washing machine- it was bubbling up from the hole in the floor. All bathrooms in Israel have a drainage pipe from the floor down to the sewage system but while most of them are covered, ours is covered in a piece of plastic with large holes. Thereby letting in things that don't belong in a pipe and are not beneficial to its health. Like hairs, gravel (from when they “fixed” our bathroom) and probably little pieces of plastic that Pilpel had generously contributed to the cache of treasure down there. I immediately called the landlady while searching for the life raft I'm sure we have around somewhere and to my astonishment she actually answered the phone and called the insurance company who then sent someone over within the next few hours. Who says Israelis aren't efficient?
According to the insurance company, unclogging pipes isn't covered by them. If the plumber could unclog it by hand then it would be 50 shekels. If he had to use a machine to do it, it would cost 400 shekels. Luckily the landlady had kindly agreed to pay for it. After deigning to glance down into the pipe for 2 seconds, he decided he couldn't unclog it by hand. He had to go back for the machine because for whatever reason, he hadn't brought it with him (considering there were two options, unclog by hand or use the machine). If he had decided that he could do it by hand he probably would have had to go back for his hands. At some point while checking the water, he realized that our toilet runs. And I don't mean in a sweatsuit and jogging shoes. He told us that we'd have to completely replace the toilet but he tried to fix it a bit so that it wouldn't be as bad.
A few days after the flood in the bathroom, my roommate realized that now our toilet was leaking. And I don't mean that someone was taking a leak in the toilet. The back overflowed a bit every time we flushed it and water was pooling in the bucket she had placed there. Some of it made it into the bucket anyway. I don't know what the plumber did but it seems he's made himself some more work.
We did manage to find a fridge. Someone was moving into an apartment that already had a fridge so she had to do something with her fridge for a year. We're storing it for a year in our kitchen as opposed to a storage facility which she'd have to pay for. I just hope we don't kill it. We don't have a very good track record with fridges and it'd be a shame if we did in a fridge that wasn't even ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment