Water water everywhere...

I have not updated this blog for some weeks. For most of that time I was in the US for Christmas and New Year. Then two days after I moved into the apartment that we are in the process of purchasing, I was awakened at 3:30 am by a strange man in my bedroom!

It was the Hausmeister (the building maintenance person) who had had to break in to wake me up. He sloshed in water half an inch deep as he walked. Exactly what happen is unclear. It may have involved a new pipe that somehow become unstuck. Or perhaps something broke. In any case the flood began between 11:00 when I went to bed in a completely dry apartment and 3:30 in the morning when Noah would have felt right at home (preferably inside his ark).

The Hausmeister shut off the flow, but we had to try to get rid of the standing water. He brought a water vacuum, while the current owner (an extremely nice man) and I bailed with waste baskets and dustpans (the waste basket was more effective). None of us thought about the danger of electrocuting ourselves by standing in water while turning on lights and pulling plugs from things that might be endangered. We should be amazed to be alive. It is a tribute to Apple Computers that the transformer for my laptop was lying in water, plugged in, and kept working without interruption.

By 6:00 the place was relatively free of water, at least by the standard of two hours before. The Hausmeister and the owner went back to their apartments and I went back to bed, which seemed like the only sensible thing to do since the bed was dry and since I had to teach later that day.

When I reached the office, I asked my secretary to find whether I could move back to the university guest house temporarily. This caused some unintended panic at the guest hause, because my secretary thought I was still living there and that I just wanted a different apartment there because of the water problem in one of their apartments.

There was also a small panic about insurance. Happily the current owner found his policy. And the damage to apartments below seems (I am told) to have been surprisingly modest.

All the carpets had to be thrown out and the lovely and relatively new parquet floor is starting to come up -- a total loss. Hopefully the insurance money will pay to replace everything. We are thinking of stone or ceramic tile everywhere (with rugs over much of it of course). That would be in keeping with the Bauhaus style of the building and would be easier than wood to maintain. Several other apartments in the building have done something similar and what I have seen looks good.