At my current rental, I’ve had a series of issues that have come up. I think this is to be expected considering I live in a house that was built about 100 years ago and I’ve been here for almost 12 years. But I feel like I have had so many random things that have gone wrong and needed to be fixed. I’ve had multiple flood issues from my water heater, bathroom pipes, garbage disposal, and toilet. And I’ve also had a gas leak before or have had gas appliances not work. With my old landlord, things were fixed pretty quickly and they were on top of telling me the status of things being repaired.
Well, last week at my house, the gas company came out because there was a suspected gas leak on my street. They came over to let me know my gas would be off for maybe a few hours, but they would let me know when it was back on and they would relight the appliances. This was a minor inconvenience, but obviously, a gas leak needs to be fixed.
It turns out that the gas leak is in the pipe that provides gas to half the units where I live. My current place has a driveway in the middle and each side of the driveway has one main gas pipe. The pipe on my side was repaired a few years ago. This time, it’s the pipe on the other side.
Normally, this wouldn’t affect me much, but when the gas company came back to turn on my appliances, they said they could not turn on my heater. I guess it needs to have a major cleaning because it’s a carbon monoxide risk. I don’t think it was causing issues for me before because my carbon monoxide monitor is only about a foot from the heater, but the risk isn’t good so I can’t use my heater. I’m glad I have a little space heater, but it gets cold inside my house at night and it’s been tough. I’m hoping my landlord will fix this soon (and legally he has to because heat is a required thing to have in a rental), but I feel worse for my neighbors across the driveway. Not only do they not have heat, but they also don’t have hot water or gas appliances. And over the weekend, we all discovered that the dryer in our laundry room is a gas dryer. So none of us were able to dry our clothes after washing them. So I had to hang up all my clothes around my house and hope they will dry soon.
While I was dealing with the issues at my current place, I was also dealing with a minor issue at my new place. I am trying to get things set up for me so that they will be ready when I move in. And this includes making sure I will be able to set up internet when I move in. There were a lot of cables that looked like they could have been for the internet, but none of them seemed to be in the right place. So I set up an appointment this past weekend to have a technician come and help me see what I might need to do.
This should have been an easy appointment, but just like the issue with the gas leak, nothing is as simple as it appears. The first technician showed up, was looking at some of the wires in my walls (fortunately, we are in the part of the renovation where the walls have a lot of holes in them), said he was going outside to look at things, and then 5 minutes later I got a call saying my appointment was canceled. The technician just left and never told me! I called back and the customer service person I spoke with was shocked that happened and said they set up another appointment. Nobody can explain what happened, but the company canceled and reset my appointment multiple times within 6 hours. And because I was always told they were always on their way, I spent about 7 hours waiting for someone to show up.
Finally, someone showed up who was able to do the work I needed to have done. And because of all the weirdness that happened with the appointments, the supervisor for the technician and the manager for the service department also arrived to make sure everything was completed. What should have been a 1-hour thing ended up being about 7 hours, but at least it is done. There is a bit of additional work we have to do to make everything work the way we want it to, but it’s minor compared to what we thought we might have to do.
I know that having no heat in my current place could be worse (while it does get cold here, it’s nothing compared to most of the country). And I know spending 7 hours for an appointment isn’t horrible either, just annoying. But I think having everything at one time was just a bit overwhelming for me and really made me have a bad weekend. But hopefully, I will have heat again soon and this is one of the last bumps in the road for my renovation!
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