Tuesday, November 09, 2021

the kitchen sink

Just had a visit from my building's repair people. This was the second visit in 24 hours: last night, when I got home after 10 p.m., I saw a notice on my door that said the repair people needed to look at my plumbing. When I went inside, I discovered that my water had been turned off. I called the number for the plumbing office, and someone picked up and said he'd be at my place immediately. A few minutes later, a dude arrived with a younger dude in tow. They told me that they'd had reports of a leak on the floor below me; the report had been made around 6:30 p.m, so the leak had probably occurred while I was still in the office, i.e., I wasn't around to run any water. 

The guys fiddled around under my kitchen sink, took a brief look at my bathroom, and said they found nothing strange. They were also very apologetic about disturbing me, and with that, they left. I tried my sink after they'd gone and immediately discovered the water pressure was down to around 10% of its normal force, which made me think the repair guys had adjusted something but had failed to adjust it back. I messed around with the valves beneath my sink, but no matter what I did, the water pressure remained frustratingly low. I returned the valves to the setting at which I'd found them and stewed.

At 12:30 today, I called the repair office and asked someone to come up and take a look at my sink again to determine why the water was coming out so weakly. Around 1:15 p.m., one guy came up and couldn't figure out what was going on, so he called in another guy. Together, the two determined that my faucet setup was old and needed to be changed. They scraped out a bunch of gunk from inside the faucet, but when the second guy was screwing the plastic cover back onto the faucet's front, he broke the damn thing. Without showing any shame, the repair guys said I needed to talk to my HR office about arranging to have a new faucet installed.

Upshot: the repair guys reestablished full water flow, but they didn't solve the mystery of why this problem occurred right after the first team had left my place the night before. The second team also ended up breaking my faucet, which works fine on "stream" mode, but when I switch it to "spray" mode, it sprays horizontally now. Fuck.

I normally don't have this kind of problem with repair people, but both teams did, in my opinion, a really shitty job. The first team came in, said everything was OK (no leaks), and left me with weakly flowing water. The second team got the water back to full power but broke my faucet in doing so. In both cases, problems were solved and created at the same time, and I'm annoyed as hell. So now, I'll take a photo of my broken faucet (with the water streaming out sideways), send that and another repair request to my HR department, and hopefully, we'll get this problem resolved before the end of the week. Christ.






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