Moving to a new apartment is like getting married: what could happen is anyone's guess. There are always the few things that go wrong with the move or with the new residence. There are the quirks that annoy you at the time but that years later serve as signposts for nostalgia (Oh, honey, remember the gas leak in our old stove? how you almost died in a kitchen fire? Those were the days! [Laughs.]). But my recent transition from one apartment to the next has been the worst I've ever been through. In technical jargon, it's been a "cluster fuck."
Cedric the Contractor
"Yeah. We gonna need to put in some flex pipin' up top and some 3/4-inch plywood under it to keep it upright," said Lee, the owner and head contractor of Problem Solved Home Repair the first night we were in our new apartment. There was a problem with the water heater: A middle-aged machine in a sickly old shed behind the apartment, the heater listed like the Tower of Pisa. With good reason, the gas company representative said he couldn't turn on the gas until the heater was stabilized. So our landlord called the amiable, fast-talking Lee, who I dubbed "Cedric the Contractor" behind his back because he was chubby and dark and his features looked a lot like the famous entertainer's. After diagnosing the heater's ills, Lee promised to come back the next day and take care of it.
Two days later, he did. (For the rest of the week, he would show up precisely whenever he hadn't said he would, to not solve the other problems that I'll relate in Part Two.) Didn't matter, though. We were only waiting to turn the gas on so we could have hot water and a working stove.
The Customer Dissatisfaction Representative
Since Cedric was late in fixing the heater, we didn't talk to the gas company again until Thursday, when an ill-informed "customer satisfaction representative" told my girlfriend A. to call back the next morning and request an appointment for that day. She had to work, so the next day I stayed home to call the gas company and wait for them and Cox cable to show up. Thanks to Cox being understaffed and in demand, we'd been waiting a week to have our land line, Internet access and cable TV transferred and in the meantime had missed a couple of crucial calls and emails thanks to our being tele-incommunicado. (We couldn't check email at work and couldn't go back to our old apartment, which was being fumigated, which was why we moved in a hurry.)
While I was waiting for the cable guy, I called the gas company. The customer satisfaction representative told me that I should've called the day before, and that since (unlike the non-monopoly cable company) the gas company was closed on the weekend, the soonest we could have an appointment was Monday.
That was fine, I told her, because I didn't need hot water. After all, I hadn't had it for a week.
She tried to book someone for that day, but no one had time. The guy's supposed to come today, between 1 and 5. A. can't be home till 3:30. But that's okay. Early last week, when I stayed home all day waiting for them, to no avail, I'd called the gas company to ask where their rep was. They'd informed me that a rep had stopped by and found the apartment "vacant," despite my being there all day waiting and hearing nothing. That'd been their second visit. For the first visit, I'd walked over from the old apartment, arriving at the beginning of the four-hour "time window" within which they were supposed to arrive, only to discover that they'd already been there and had left a note about a possible problem with the water heater.
This in mind, I asked the customer dissatisfaction representative how I could be sure anyone would show up and knock during the appointed "time window." She assured me that if no one did, I could complain and they'd send someone out that day. This entire situation clearly demonstrates that the limited-government conservatives were right all along: Big business is much more efficient and less bureaucratic than a government agency ever could be.
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