The Dim-Witted Apartment Manager, Part 2 ~1979
When it was time to move into my first post-collegiate apartment, I was delighted to find a brand new complex in a location that was convenient to my job, my swim team, and many fine retail establishments. I had assumed that, as a previously-unoccupied establishment, everything would be in A-1 unmolested operating condition. Sparkling shiny appliances; pristine paint on the walls, and window coverings that would glide smoothly into their appointed positions. Right?
Since everything I owned could easily fit into the back seat of my 1978 Ford Pinto, it didn’t take long to move in. My temporary roommate, Brent, owned little more than a duffel bag, so we spent very little time on assuming occupancy and got right to work on the important stuff – cooking a frozen Tony’s pizza. The oven worked, and the freezer light came on to show that there was room enough for 7 such pizzas. After a trip to the local Dillon’s store, the freezer was stocked up and life was good.
Since Brent and I both started our day by swimming and then showering at the Wichita Swim Club, we had no immediate reason to test the apartment’s pre-fab bath/shower combo unit. The water worked, and the toilet flushed, so we assumed things were just peachy.
The next evening, though, Brent came out of the bathroom with a puzzled look on his face. “What’s wrong?” I asked. He thought about it a moment, then answered. “My sock is wet.”
Good Lord, I thought, I’m rooming with a guy who pees on himself. At the very best, this makes me question his competence with his male equipment; and at the worst represents what could become a serious hygiene challenge. “Good Lord,” I said, “How could you pee on yourself?”
“I don’t know,” he said, continuing to look confused. “My sock is wet on the bottom. If I peed on myself, wouldn’t it be wet on the top?” He looked at me as if expecting me to unravel this perplexing mystery.
Rather than replying, I got up and walked into the bathroom. “Aw, man. There’s water all over the place.”
A quick observation of the shape and position of the puddle left no doubt that it was not the result of any sort of toiletry accident, but in fact, was a leak coming in from underneath the wall. Brent and I were both relieved; I sopped up the water with a towel, and he simply wore one sock for the rest of the evening.
The next day, I reported the incident to Joyce, our dependable apartment manager. She let out a deep sigh and shook her head. “I’ll bet the guy next door let his tub overflow.” She nodded as if agreeing with herself. “That happens sometimes.” She nodded some more.
I hesitated a moment to see if she was going to continue with the thought, but finally concluded that she thought she was done. “Um,” I said, “could you maybe see what you could do to prevent the problem from happening again? Please?”
“Oh, sure. Yeah. I guess. Um, I guess I probably ought to talk with the guy. Yeah. No problem.” I thanked her and left, anticipating no future puddles.
The next day, it took two towels to sop up the flood from under the wall. Joyce said that she’d talk to the gentleman again. I took a trip to the laundry room to run a load of towels, just in case. (Most of my towels were pretty low on the absorbency scale. I had received them as “gifts” of the University of Kansas Department of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, and most of them still had faint remnants of the “HPER” stamp on them, but some were pretty threadbare.)
The next time I reported a bathroom flood, Joyce was indignant. “Hmmph!” she snorted. “That guy told me he was going to be out of town all week, and yet here he is filling up his tub until it runs over and soaks the floor again, even though he’s not even supposed to be there.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “there may be some other problem – like a malfunction with the plumbing.” I mean, after all, how many people do you know who overfill the bathtub until it runs under the neighbor’s wall – over and over again? It just didn’t sound right.
“No, I’m sure it’s simply a repetitive bathtub overfill problem.” She was quite sure of herself. “I’ll give him a good talking-to when he gets back in town.”
“But if he’s out of town, and we’ve just been flooded…” I began, but then stopped when I realized that she’d already forgotten I was there. Sighing deeply, I walked back to my apartment.
After that, I carefully watched the parking lot for the return of the neighbor who shared my bathroom wall. We’d never met before, but I made a point of zipping out to meet him as he prepared to enter his apartment. When I introduced myself as his neighbor, he immediately said, “So you’re the SOB who fills his tub until it overflows so that it leaks into my bathroom. What the hell is wrong with you?”
After a brief but enlightening discussion, my new friend and I were unable to conclude whether Joyce was actually evil, or just abominably stupid – but we did agree on the next course of action. It ended up requiring a call to the investment group who actually owned the apartment complex, but we finally got some action. A carpenter came by and knocked a hole in my bathroom wall, revealing a quarter inch puncture in one of the main pipes in the system feeding the showers for not only our two adjacent apartments, but also the two above us. Whenever any of the four tenants turned on the shower, the feed pipe spurted water into the space between the adjacent unit walls, which would eventually leak out into both of our bathrooms.
Whatever made Joyce think she could solve the problem by telling each of us the same lame “neighbor is a psycho” story remains a mystery. Shortly after the repairs were made, the management company replaced her* with another manager, and the remainder of my tenure in this complex was comparatively blissful.
While I was there, though, I did have some interesting episodes with the cute girls across the hall, and at the McDonalds adjacent to the complex parking lot. But those stories will have to wait until later…
*Footnote: I have no idea what other complaints the apartment management company may have received about Joyce’s incompetence, but here’s one additional look at her “problem-solving” skills:
My apartment was on the “garden” level, which meant that my apartment was not completely underground, but that you did have to descend stairs in order to enter. The apartments on the “1st” floor, then, could have balconies, which were only a few feet off the ground, but gave the illusion of being luxuriously elevated.
The problem was that birds found the underside of those balconies to be an inviting spot to build a home. Unfortunately, the acoustics of the support beams channeled any bird noises directly into my bedroom, which made it very difficult to get any sleep. The constant directed peeping and chirping, while considered soothing to some people, served to deprive me of rest and drive me into the depth of annoyance. I asked my good buddy Joyce if it would be possible to relocate the nest.
“No. We can’t do that,” she said. But the next day, I saw her approaching the nest with a box of matches. Apparently, she was going to burn them out, assuming of course that the chemical-soaked wood of the balcony structure and the pressboard siding of the building would remain immune to any flames that happened to flare up.
I’m not sure if she thought better of the idea, or if she just couldn’t get a match lit, but she ended up not going through with her original plan. By this time, I had more or less gotten used to the bird sounds, and figured that they’d be moving on soon anyway, and pretty much forgot about it.
However, when I returned from a weeklong trip, I discovered that there was now an additional board covering the spot where the bird’s nest had been, and all was quiet. I’m not sure if the birds had vacated the nest, or if perhaps the nest had been moved to a more acceptable spot…but my suspicion is that she boarded the baby birds up inside the beam gap just like characters in an Edgar Allen Poe story. Since she disappeared shortly after the resolution of the “overflowing bathtub” problem, I was never able to find out what really happened.
