nerd’s eye view

In answer to the question: How long do you plan to be so crabby?

February 7, 2005 – 1:40 am | by nerd's eye view

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Or, Marilyn’s telephone: Ex-pats complain about utilities on the Internet.

This morning, right on schedule at 8am, the heating repair guy showed up. He’s here to replace our radiators. He drained the system first thing and as I type this, he’s in the living room running a grinder or a pipe saw or some such thing to cut out the old radiator valve and install a new one. This is, overall, a good thing, of course. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to what I say about Austria, you know that it’s cold here.

Our heat goes out every winter. I remember when it went out last winter because we had temperatures that were consistently below -20F. This year the heat went out around Christmas time. It was unseasonably warm, the lows hanging out just around freezing, so it wasn’t as bad to be without central heating as the year before. Prior heating fiascos have involved main burners giving up the ghost and pressure valves shutting down so we get heat at half the normal capacity.

It’s a good five years that I’ve been a witness to the uphill battle over the heat in our complex. There are all these players and it’s taken, in official units of time measurement, for-fucking-ever to see any action on getting things fixed. There’s the government – they lease all these buildings to house their employees. There’s the building management company. There’s a new owner. There’s the heating company. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare, really. And there are the residents who I’m sure echo my sentiments, which are as follows: Are you fucking kidding with this?! You wait five years to fix things and now, you finally get it together and you unhook us from the system in the middle of record snowfall and the season’s lowest temperatures so far?! What the hell is wrong with you people?!

I’m especially crabby about the repairs right now because of the following reasons:

1. I use the mornings at home to work. It’s hard to work when there’s a guy running a pipe saw in the other room.
2. I’m getting over a cold. It’s not a bad cold by any means, but it’s pretty hard to get any good rest when there’s a guy running a pipe saw in the other room.
3. I’m leaving for London on Thursday. Why couldn’t the guy run the pipe saw on Thursday, after I’m gone?
4. It’s really too cold to be outside. Normally, I’d head out to play outside, but in this bitter cold with the cold I’m trying to get over, I’m housebound. So I am stuck inside with a guy who’s running a pipe saw.
5. Give me time. I’ll think of more reasons.

The guy running the pipe saw is a nice enough guy. He’s very sheepish about the timing. He’s promised me the heat will be back on when he goes home and that he’ll be done tomorrow afternoon. And it’s not his fault. After all, he’s just the guy in the overalls that the company sent to do the work. Hell, even he knows it’s a pain in the ass, he’s not stupid and he’s not some ogre that wants to turn off the heat when it’s -20F. But I’m crabby all the same, and rightfully so, I think.

There’s little doubt in my mind that having a cold has increased the volume on my crabbiness. I’m sure my cold will be gone by the time the guy with the pipe saw finishes working in our building – I think he has one more apartment to go. Unfortunately, knowing it will be over soon is not enough to end my general ill will. It’s just a day and a half of repairs and a standard mid-winter cold. The confluence of those two events, however, has ensured that I am going to be crabby at least until tomorrow afternoon, when all of our radiators are shiny and new and the guy with the pipe saw has moved on to irritate some other neighbor with a midwinter cold.

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As a little diversion , I’m tracking vernacular units of measurement. So far I’ve got:

Metric buttload: How much snow we had last week
For-fucking-ever: How long it takes to get “official” things done in Austria

Additions? You know what to do.