No Heat/No Hot Water

Woke up this morning a little before 5:00 (in other words, an hour before I needed to get up) and I was freezing!!  I looked at the ceiling, where the time and temperature is projected and it said it was 47 degrees outside.  That isn’t too cold.  Hardly cold enough to sleep with the windows closed.  If it’s around 50 and I have my quilt and sheepskin (fake) comforter on the bed, I sleep with the window open so I have fresh air all night.

So I woke up with the pile of blanket, quilt and sheepskin (fake) comforter on me and I was still freezing.  I knew I wasn’t sick, as in feverish which would give me the chills, so it had to be something else.  I got up and put my slippers on and went to investigate.  I checked the thermostat and it was set at 70 but the temperature was 60.  Uh oh.  I checked the registers and they were cold.  UH OH.  The furnace was out.

Not a huge deal because it wasn’t too cold once I was up and moving, albeit an hour before I had to get up, but it occurred to me that if the furnace is out, that means the hot water heater isn’t working.  I listened and couldn’t hear anyone in the other apartments moving around or the water running so I seized the opportunity.  Even though I was an hour early and could have gone back to bed, I jumped in the shower to try to get as warm a shower as I could before all the hot water was gone.

It wasn’t too bad.  The water was lukewarm and didn’t start getting cold until the very end.  I have taken colder showers than that so it was tolerable.  I did hurry because I didn’t trust that the water wouldn’t turn ice cold at some point.

So, here it was, 5:30 in the morning. I am up, showered and have three hours to go before I need to leave for work.  Oh well.  I fixed a pot of tea, put a pot of water on the stove to heat up so I could do the dishes from the night before and decided to play with the computer and watch the news for a while.

Eventually I heard my neighbors moving about and I would hear the water going on, running a few minutes and then being turned off as they all came to the realization that no heat meant no hot water.  I wondered how long it would take for one, or all, of them to call the landlord.  I decided to wait until at least 7:30 to call him.  It wasn’t that much of an emergency.  After all, it was well above freezing out and the pipes weren’t in any danger of freezing.

When I finally did call him, he said that the other neighbors had called and he had already hit the reset button on the furnace and was going to have it serviced to see why it went off.  If, before I called him, I had just glanced out my window, I would have seen him sitting in his van in the driveway waiting for the oil company.  But I didn’t know he was sitting there so I called him to tell him something he was already fully aware of and already fixing.

My brother pointed out to me tonight on the phone that he thought it was interesting that my first thought was to grab the hot water before anyone else.  Yeah…I do feel a little selfish about that.  Just a little.  Wasn’t a very neighborly thing to do.   But someone had to use the last of the hot water and, since I was the first one awake, why shouldn’t it be me?  I figure early bird gets the worm. Or you snooze you lose…. which is a more appropriate saying considering the circumstances.

I haven’t talked to my neighbors yet but, if they ask, I will tell them what I did.  It wasn’t like I stole the hot water.  Hot water comes with the apartment and, as I said, someone had to use it.  And, if they complain to me about the fact that we lost heat and hot water, I will point out that it is an old building, these things happen, and this landlord had it fixed before 8:00 in the morning.  The last landlord didn’t get it fixed until two days after the furnace broke.  We should count our blessings and not complain about something that was no one’s fault and where no one was to blame.

One final note on the heat/hot water situation.  I certainly do appreciate that my apartment is nice and warm right now and that I can have a nice long hot shower in the morning.  Something like this certainly helps one to appreciate the small luxuries of life, doesn’t it?