Busted!

I normally try not to grumble too much, but lately it seems like our apartment is falling apart! For those of you who don't know, our apartment is rented for us by our boss, so it's not ours, but it's tricky to get things fixed when you don't speak the language.

First we somehow blew a circuit that shattered a lightbulb all around our house and left us sitting in the dark. We search all over for the circuit board with no luck so we had to call the maintainance guy up... he quickly located the board behind a picture and we were back in business.

Then our water cooler erupted, leaving us with a flooded kitchen (and no mop to clean it up with). That took the landlord almost a week to attend to, leaving us with finding rather creative ways to get clean drinking water.

Then we were without internet for 6 days... that also took the agent about 4 days to get on.

Then the DVD player busted. Long story there, but basically the audio won't work on it. The background noises play, but the main characters' voices don't. The DVDs play fine on our laptop, so we know it's not the DVDs themselves that are broken. This has taken the landlord the past 5 WEEKS to get on top of! He's had it "fixed" twice and each time it comes back even worse than before. The last time he still DROPPED it on the floor so now it looks like it's been thru a battle and makes this loud noise like and airplane taking off. Still, he swears up and down (in Chinese) that it's not broken and refuses to replace it. Cheapskate. We're pretty mad about this. Correction- I'm pretty mad. Andrew told me to just get over it already- we're not getting a new DVD player.

Finally, last night, just as we were about to go to bed Andrew noticed a strange noise coming from the washing machine. We had a closer look and discovered that the faucet connecting the water supply from the wall had sprung a leak and was spraying water all over. The wall was completely soaked and the drywall was peeling down the wall. So that was another call to our agent and the maintainance man who had to come have a look, leave to buy a part (good thing the shops are open late here), come back, hammer around and finally get it all fixed and turn the water back on so that we could brush our teeth in the morning.

Anyways... there's my little rant. I know all houses have things go wrong with them, but sometimes it seems like a LOT in a very short time. Thankfully we'll be out of our place in about 3 months, but I still kinda wonder what will be the next thing to go?