About five minutes into my shower this morning, I noticed that the shower drain was clogged and the water from the shower was overflowing in a pretty significant way out of the shower and into my bathroom. This joins a number of other maintenance issues on the list of Shit That’s Wrong With My Apartment:

  • The lock on the front door no longer locks
  • The toilet in one of the bathrooms requires a certain level of persistence re: flushing
  • The door on the other bathroom either doesn’t lock, or locks you in
  • The door to my balcony doesn’t stay closed
  • The light in one of the bathrooms only works intermittently
  • One of the refrigerators has a puddle of water inside it that reforms no matter how often you wipe it up
  • The kitchen sink will occasionally decline to produce hot water
  • The bathroom showers will occasionally decline to produce hot water
  • Two of the burners on the stove are broken
  • The handle of one of the pots snapped in half yesterday, rendering the pot more or less useless
  • The wireless router needs to be reset every two or so days or the Oxford VPN stops working

And these are just the issues in D4. There are six flats in this building of the complex, each with five rooms and each with a litany of problems.

At first, I thought putting all the Americans in the building with all the defects was just the British way of saying, “Thank you for declaring your independence!” But after talking to a friend who lives in another building in the complex about his persistent hot water issues, I’ve come to realize that these problems are a bit more widespread than just the D-block.

The apartment manager, Lindsay, has an interesting repair strategy when it comes to maintenance problems. Namely, he reverses whatever problem you report to him. When our front door wouldn’t unlock, he came, banged on it for a few minutes, and then declared the problem solved — and indeed, our original issue was; the front door no longer stays locked, but nor does it do anything but stay unlocked anymore. When my flatmate Madeline‘s window wouldn’t open, he corrected that issue and she now has an open window… that won’t close. The un-flushing toilet (disgusting), overflowing shower (disgusting), broken bathroom door (irritating), and leaky refrigerator (wet) are, presumably, all on the list to be inverted (into a toilet that won’t stop flushing, a shower that doesn’t work at all, a bathroom door that doesn’t exist, and a refrigerator that isn’t cold), but we haven’t heard any updates on them yet.

Every once in a while, the manager will reply to an e-mail you send reporting some maintenance problem with the observation that the Americans in the D building send about four times as many complaints as the British students living in every other building in the complex. What I’m trying to figure out now is: is that because American college students don’t have the keep-calm-and-carry-on mentality of our British counterparts, or because we really did get the dud apartments?