When the walls leaked….

It was just another long weekend, that I was looking forward to, with loads of outdoor activities. With the weather playing its part to help move forward with everything I had planned, including a dip in the swimming pool that recently opened in our apartment complex, little did I know that I would have a “private” one in my apartment!

It happened around 12:00 noon on Saturday. I was lazying around in my room, taking a quick break before heading out to the city to watch the fireworks (I know this post is a little too outdated, and should have been in a month ago), when the fire alarm decided to go off. As was the case in our building, any small smoke in one of the houses usually set off an alarm in the whole building, and this time too I decided to ignore it, hoping that it would not last long enough to get me out of my bed. 10 minutes went by and it showed no signs of ceasing. It was then that I decided to take a stroll down the stairs to see what had happened. But as soon as I came out of my room, I saw a pool of water gathering itself in front of the bathroom, under the carpet. Rushing into bathroom, I saw the tub overflowing due to the tap which my roommate had left open!

It took a while to vacuum the carpet and drain out the pool in the bathroom, but little did I realise that there were much more “serious consequences” to this trivial act of overflowing tub! As “fate” would have it, the water had found its way through the walls to the hallway and all the way down to the apartment below, shorting the alarm circuit on its way down! And people had gathered outside my door trying to figure out what was going on. What followed was two hours of hard work on a holiday weekend for the maintenance crew and a not-so-happy look on the face of the old lady who lived downstairs .

Today, a heavy thunderstorm that rattled the windows in my room, woke me up with a start. I looked out of my window to see a similar sight of an emerging flood and that took me back to the day when I had one in my very own apartment . So here’s to today morning’s downpour….