Happy Valentine's Day to me!

Perhaps I shouldn't post when I'm pissed off.

But I am thoroughly pissed off, and I'm going to post anyway. So there!

I was anticipating a quiet day; I'm communicating with several nice men on Eharmony, the weather is gorgeous, and I was planning a shopping trip later on, maybe, or trying a new recipe, but soaking every single one of my good towels with dirty water from my kitchen floor was most definitely NOT on the agenda.

After luxuriously reading in bed until 8:30am, I got up and made myself some coffee, and thought I'd go ahead and load the dishwasher and give the kitchen a quick once-over while the pot was brewing. So I loaded up the dishwasher, tossed in the Cascade for shinier-than-shiny dishes and started it up.

It normally makes a hissing sound when it starts up, but after a few moments, it struck me that this was not the normal hissing sound - it was louder and more ominous.

So I ventured into the kitchen to discover that the entire floor was awash in hot water - oh, friggin' CRAP! So I threw open the cabinet doors under the sink and started madly pulling out bottles and cans and sponges and rolls of paper towels and dust cloths and boxes - to discover that it looked like some idiot who obviously never graduated from any kind of school for plumbers or cracked a volume of "Plumbing for Dummies" had simply stuck a rubber hose on the nozzle for the hot water - without any kind of fastener whatsoever!!

Even I - a girly girl, with a french tip manicure on my gel nails, who has never ever done any sort of plumbing - know that when you fasten two of anything together in the plumbing world, you first seal the threads of the screw or pipe with some kind of plumber's putty, then you put the second pipe on, tighten it down, and then you support that connection with that metal band fastener thingie that you can tighten with a screwdriver or a small wrench!!! And...if you want to do a plumbing job right, especially on any kind of important and often-used fixture, you should use metal - not rubber and plastic. Even I know that.

Hell, I don't even know the correct technical term for whatever it is that is needed - but I sure as hell know that a rubber hose is not a good idea for any kind of fixture that needs to last, especially under pressure and very hot water.

So, when I see all that friggin' water, I grabbed my cell phone - and then I ran out the door and down the stairs to my landlady's apartment (with my cell phone unused in my hand and in my pajamas) and started madly ringing the doorbell. (All the while, very hot water is spraying everywhere under my sink.) After about three hysterical rounds of four or five rings, a bleary-eyed young man (her son?) opened the door. I blurted out that there was hot water spraying all over my kitchen floor and ran back up to my apartment.

I spent the next ten or so frantic minutes trying to get everything out from under the sink - after I shut off the dishwasher and determined that the water hadn't backed up in there because of something blocking the drain. When I had finally madly pulled everything out from under the sink, I discovered the hot water nozzle (or whatever it is you call that thing) was spraying hot water full-blast under the sink, because that blankety-blank-blank rubber hose had come loose.

I tried at first to force the hose back on to the nozzle, but the water was way too hot (I burned my hand, damnit!!) and the pressure was too high. Then I tried to shut the water off with the shut off valve. (Lefty loosey, righty-tighty - it works!) The valve was pretty stiff (and that water was goddamned HOT), but I finally succeeded in shutting the water off, and I burned my hand in the process.

The landlady called on the phone and I told her what was going on. She told me to put all my towels in the water to soak it up. I was horrified. I don't even have that many towels in the first place, and soaking up dirty water off my kitchen floor was not what I wanted to do with them. But I did it anyway. I pulled every towel I own out of my linen closet and laid them in the water. They are now completely sodden, and piled in the sink. Great. Fifty pounds of wet towels in the sink, which I am going to have to pay $2.25 per load (in quarters, mind you!) to wash and dry.

My landlady finally showed up to see what was going on. She told me that the apartment of the poor guy who lives downstairs is completely flooded; his carpeting is soaked. Poor guy. He's not home much; I think he stays with his girlfriend - he's going to be in for an even nastier surprise than I got. Poor guy.

I told my landlady that the water had gotten underneath the dishwasher and the refrigerator, so I asked that she have someone come to clean up the mess, because I cannot move the dishwasher, and I sure as hell am not going to move my gigantic fridge by myself.

She agreed, thank goodness, so my next task was to move everything off the top of the fridge...which is also artfully (and very inconveniently) covered with really cool tacky magnets from around the world.

The plumber came, thank goodness! (Julio, you are my Valentine!) He had the problem fixed within ten minutes, and then he showed me the rubber fixture he took out from under the sink.

As I suspected, it was a cheapass rubber hose that had originally come with a cap attached to thread onto the nozzle. So, it actually did have a fastener at one time, apparently, that cheapass plastic cap on the end of the length of rubber hose that screwed onto the nozzle, and it was expected to somehow hold up under the pressure and heat of the constant use of hot water under the kitchen sink. According to Julio, my plumbing Valentine, to save a couple of bucks, whoever did the plumbing in this apartment used that rubber fixture (as opposed to a metal hose and fixture) because it was cheap.

But, as it happens with all cheapass things, they wear out quickly, and so, predictably, this morning, that little cheapass rubber hose, from just a little too much pressure and a little too much very hot water, gave up the ghost and broke off (also predictably) just beneath the threaded cap, thus kicking off a flood of epic proportions.

In order to save a few bucks, the owner of the building approved the use of a cheapass rubber hose when the proper metal fixture and flexible hose would have only cost a few bucks more. Let's be generous and say it cost $10 more than the cheapass rubber hose, shall we?

So, what has Mr. Building Owner gotten for his ten buck savings?

An emergency visit from a plumber on a Sunday morning.

And an emergency visit from professional carpet cleaners to not only clean up my apartment (soaking up the water from the carpet at the kitchen door, which is wet), but to do a big clean-up job on the poor guy's apartment downstairs - which is pretty badly flooded. Also, the carpeting in the stairwell and hallway is wet as well - I took down two bags of water-soaked debris and noticed the squishy sound my feet made on the stairs as I wended my way down the four flights leading to the garage.

All for a grand savings of ten whole dollars. Hurrah!

Reader, this is the very meaning of the cliche "penny wise, but pound foolish" brought to unpleasant life.

The carpet cleaner came. He checked behind the fridge and fortunately found no visible water. He also removed the front panel of my dishwasher and didn't find any water under there either. So he's going to clean and dry the six or so square feet of carpeting near my kitchen door...and then go downstairs to do damage control on the apartment beneath mine.

As an aside and a corollary to this story, I have lived in several apartments here in Los Angeles over the last twenty-five years, and since my first apartment, which was on the ground floor, was burglarized twice (I was home both times), I swore never again to live on the first floor. The Rhino People (you get the idea, right?) who lived in the apartment upstairs -- also were a very large (seriously large!) factor in my decision never to live on the first floor again, but that's a story for another blog.

My subsequent apartments (all four of them) have been on the top floor of the building I lived in - mostly as a kind of safety precaution, because I like having my windows open, and only the most determined burglar is going to climb the wall like a spider to get in the windows.

As it turns out, this top-floor policy has saved me even more misery, because I'm not the one with the BIG flood. That poor guy downstairs....

Sign me "Pissed off in Los Angeles,"

Maggie