This Should've Ended Badly

Thursday morning I awoke to a strange phenomenon in my shower. No hot water! But because it’s approximately nine thousand degrees here (including humidity) the water wasn’t ice cold and more importantly, didn’t feel ice cold. So while I had to teach myself some new yoga poses to wash my hair without getting water on my back, it could’ve been a lot worse. When I left that morning, I asked GPOM to check the water to see if it was hot and to let me know so that I could call maintenance if it was not.


When I got home that night, I asked him about the status of the hot water. “Nope, still cold,” he told me, “but I think the pilot light is out. When it gets cooler, I’ll go relight it.” I didn’t think it was the pilot light – his reasoning was that a strong wind and the ENTIRE CAN OF RAID he used to kill the spider mafia in the HVAC room conspired to cut out the light. I told him that the water was cold in the morning, long before the ENTIRE CAN OF RAID was sprayed. But he was insistent, and I wasn’t in the mood to fight just yet. Later, he went outside with a flashlight and some short matches to try to relight the light. No dice – the matches were too short. So he went back outside with the flashlight and one of those kitchen blowtorches used to burn sugar on crème brulee.

A blowtorch. Yes. A BLOWTORCH.

I knew, with the surety that comes from seeing men with beer and barbeque grills and the ensuing lack of eyelashes, that this was the night I was going to die. GPOM was working off of more vodka than brains, a flashlight, and a blowtorch. And I was going to die a fiery death.

Since I’m writing this, you can be sure that I’m not dead, just as you can be sure I took another, colder, shower this morning. I haven’t decided yet what to name the yoga pose.

And maintenance is at my place right now, restoring the hot water.