falling water, zombies & the f dash-dash-dash
“It’s raining in my bathroom.”
The man on the other end of the line chuckled. “That’s not good, is it? Let me send someone over to take care of that.”
I put down the phone and picked up a mop. It was 9:35. I’d been zonked out on the living room sofa for a good hour when the sound of water smacking linoleum roused me from my delicious Tuesday evening coma. Plop! Plop! In my sleepy haze, I misinterpreted it for the sounds of cat mischief.
“Knock it off, Hal!”
Grumbling, I yanked the thread worn chenille blanket up to my chin and prepared for coma re-entry. Five, four, three. In whoosh and the crisp snap of claws on couch, Hal’s round black face appeared over the arm of the sofa, looking foolish and eager. You rang?В I freed an arm from my blanketed cocoon to give him a lazy, grateful scratch on the chin.
Plop! Plop!
Cripes. The ruckus was decidedly not cat mischief. By the time I found the source of the plop!, there was a tire-sized puddle on the bathroom floor. I swore (the f dash-dash-dash word). At the edge of the puddle, a brand spanking new giant roll of Charmin Ultra Soft lay, displaced from the roller, disintegrated in a soggy gray heap. I swore again. Then I called maintenance, cleaned up the mess and waited.
And waited. When I got tired of wringing out the mop, I installed garbage cans to catch the water. Then I waited some more, horizontally.В Sometime after 12:30, I gave in to sleep and dreamed that my coworker had turned into a zombie and was trying to eat my work friends. Our panicked fleeing made a steady rhythm - slap! slap! slap! - mimicking the bathroom weather system. When I woke up, it was dawn. No one had come to fix the problem, which was now a lake, shored up by the soggy hallway carpet. I took in the sodden shower curtain and the trickle that had wriggled down the bathroom mirror into the cabinet, destroying the remaining five rolls of Charmin. More f dash-dash-dashes followed. Exhausted from a night of escaping the living dead, I abandoned my long-held rule about not taking out my frustrations of people in the service industry. I redialed maintenance and swore into the answering machine.
“You owe me some f-dashing toilet paper!”