From: Yoel Roth <yoel .roth@wadh.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Hot water in D4
Date: 20 February 2010, 12.12 GMT
To: Merifield Manager <merifield .manager@wadh.ox.ac.uk>

Lindsay,

As of 11.30 or so this morning, the hot water in flat D4 is still out, despite the three e-mails I’ve sent to you this week reporting the problem. Perhaps a little more diagnostic information about the state of our boiler might be useful.

The boiler, like many ailing technological systems, occasionally ceases to serve its intended purpose: namely, making cold water hot. The resolution I’ve found, through trial and error, is to turn all the dials to their “0″ settings, and then back to their previous positions, which causes all the lights on the boiler to blink and, following a grinding noise, a quanta of hot water to be created — generally, enough for one medium-length shower or half a sinkful of dishes left behind by my careless flatmates.

(While we’re on the subject of dishes, it might be worth mentioning that the garbage disposal stopped working about two weeks ago, but no one in the flat has incorporated this reality into their kitchen procedures. Accordingly, I suspect that the disposal is now completely stuffed with coffee grounds, rice, bits of burnt egg, seeds, jam, oil, unwanted soggy vegetables, and leftovers that have become unidentifiable because of thermal inconsistencies between the front and back of the fridge that cause any food older than two days to promptly and irreversibly go bad. Just FYI.)

Anyway, this solution, which I’ve come to think of as rebooting the boiler, is hardly a solution at all. (See also: the wireless router, which has to be rebooted at least once a day, a problem I’ve been complaining about since we moved in and which has yet to be fixed. Rebooting things, it seems, is par for the course in England.) While I recognize that the boiler works, occasionally, and thus you can let fixing it slip to the bottom of your admittedly lengthy list of obligations — which include sitting in your office, not signing for packages, and never sending the maid to the building with all the Americans — any assistance you might be able to provide would be greatly appreciated.

All the best,

Yoel, and the other residents of Flat D4