Sometimes You Can't Have It All...

Sometimes you have one of those days.  The kind where you realize you should have just stayed in bed and pulled the covers over your head.  In my case I would rather look out the balcony doors and see the city.  Then somehow in the end, everything seems to work out.

I got up this morning and went right to my computer.  Where else would I go?  I was happily working away when all of a sudden I had no more Internet.  Being the geek I am, I checked my router, the modem, all the connections.  Everything was fine.  I rebooted.  Still no connection.  Finally I ran some utilities...ahh the problem is on their end not mine.

I ran to the living room, fired up my notebook, and snarked a connection from one of my neighbors.  Gotta love those people who install their routers right out of the box.  I went to Telecom's site.  This has to be one of the worlds's worst web sites.  It takes you absolutely no where.  By the time you have gone in an endless loop from Arnet (the ISP) back to Telecom, you realize you are never going to get any information. 

Call 112, they advise on the site. So I go to my phone to call them. Ahhh!  No dial tone!  I have no phone. That is why I have no Internet.  How can you call 112 when you have no phone?  I wonder if anyone else in the building has no phone.  I call down to the Portero.  Nope, the whole building has no telephone service.  Actually this whole part of my barrio.  Someone cut a cable.  Oh well.  I can try to work snarking Internet connections from my neighbors.

Then about 2 hours later the Portero calls.  They are cutting the  water to the building.  Great.  No Internet. No phone.  And now, no water.  Hopefully they won't cut the electricity.  I really do not want to walk up and down 17 flights of stairs. I decide to go to the gym and hope that when I return things will be better.

The gym.  The market.  A new shirt.  "Do we have telephones yet?"  I ask Hugo, the portero.  He shakes his head.  "Water?"  I ask hoping for a better answer. He smiles and says "Agua, si."  I continue upstairs. I hope I can snark another Internet connection.  I enter my apartment. Something is not right.  I can tell by the look on Roxie's face.

I look over to the middle of my living room.  "Hijo de puta!"  (son of a bitch or take your choice of bad words in English)  There is a small pool of water on the floor.  I look up at the ceiling. Drip, drip, drip. Furious I get towels to mop up the mess and leave there while the water drips. I run for the elevator to find out if Miguel the jerky plumber for the building broke another pipe.  I am going to kill him.

"Hugo, tengo un rio en mi departmento!  ¿Que paso con Miguel?"  Hugo looks at me like I am crazy.  He tells me that Miguel is not working in 18 A he is working in 18 B.  I tell him I don't care where he is working water is dripping from the ceiling all over my living room.

We go upstairs to my apartment.  When I open the door and he sees the disaster, he goes "Marilu!" This is my neighbor upstairs.  We run upstairs and knock on her door.  We can hear water running in the apartment.  Hugo looks at me and pounds on the door again.  He asks if I have her number.  I tell him yes I will go get it.  He runs to find the keys of her apartment.

We meet back at her door.  I give him her cell number.  He calls.  Thank God she answers.  She tells him it is OK to enter her apartment, she is on the way.  He looks at me "Espero que no esta algo mal." Marilu rents one of her rooms. Hugo enters the apartment.  The living room is a disaster.  Poor Marilu, she just did her floors.  There is water running in the laundry room and the bathroom..and all over the floor.  My living room was a pond compared to her place.

When the building shut off the water, her cleaning lady didn't understand that.  She left the faucets running in both rooms and had plugged up the sink in the bathroom.  Of course when the water came back on, she was long gone, and left the beginnings of a new river.

Marilu almost passes out when she sees her living room.  Her new floors. Hugo tells her she can rent a machine to suck up the water on Santa Fe.  She runs down there to rent it.  I go back downstairs.  The water has stopped gushing from the ceiling.  For some odd reason, Roxie has planted herself on the wet towels.

I go to the computer...still no Internet.  Guess you can't have everything.