I might actually be a bit of a genius… My apartment building has some issues. To put it...

I might actually be a bit of a genius… 

My apartment building has some issues. To put it mildly. It goes through phases of having the fire alarms go off sporadically 2-3 times per day (though it usually happens around 3:30am), necessitating the fire department to come and the building to evacuate. I live on the 17th floor, and the elevators shut off as soon as the alarms start. 

Speaking of which, they’ve been renovating the elevators since June. There are two. They announced in May that this would last 5 months in total. We’re over three months in now and they just finished the first elevator. During this entire time, 18 floors of people have been using one elevator, one which was admittedly in desperate need of an upgrade. So it’s broken down. A LOT. For the record, it’s 232 stairs from the ground floor up to my place. Happily, I’m pretty fit. Even so. There are wheelchair users, stroller users, walker users, and generally a large number of very old and very young people in the building. Not cool. 

One of the regular issues that’s apparently been going on for like, 10 years now, is that every time there’s a problem with anyone’s plumbing, they have to shut down the water in the entire building. They usually announce it in advance, that they’ll be shutting off the water, though not always. They always, always do it on Mondays, though. Monday is my one day off (although not fully, since I teach voice lessons in the evening). Aka it’s my only day of the week where I don’t have to wake up at 6:45am. I do this to myself on purpose, because one of the only perks of my building is that it has a tiny gym on the main floor. It opens at 7am, which gives me JUST enough time to work out and shower before getting to work. 

On other Mondays when they’re had water shutdowns, I’ve just sighed and woken up early enough to be showered before the water goes off. But I really wanted to both sleep in and work out today. So: the water shut off was scheduled to start at 9am. I woke up at 8:45am, filled my bathtub with the hottest water I could get, went back to sleep until 11am, then got up, worked out, and by the time I got into the bath at noon, the water was actually still pretty warm! I can’t even say how pleased I am with beating my stupid building’s system, haha! I mean, it would ideal if they could just always have the water on or something, but what can you do…