So I got home from Japan last Wednesday morning and I thought I had the perfect plan - spend a couple of days resting and relaxing, catching up on tv and posting pictures before returning to work yesterday. And while the plan worked perfectly for a few hours on Wednesday, pretty much nothing else went according to plan.
A few weeks ago I noticed black mold growing on my patio and inching ever closer to my living room. I had my company's maintenance people come out and they discovered that the pool room (which is directly below my moldy patio) had water literally dripping from the walls due to lack of ventilation. Oh, and lots of big electrical panels were also located in the soaking wet room. So for the past few weeks, I've been trying to get someone out to the house to fix the mold and figure out how to ventilate the pool room. Someone finally told me that maintenance would be out Thursday morning between 9-10 am to address the mold. While maintenance wasn't exactly "rest and relaxation", at least I didn't have to take time off work to meet them at the house.
So Wednesday evening my internet and phone stopped working. Internet is my lifeline to the world - it's how I call home (Skype) and how I watch American TV. So without internet, I just decided to read a book and go to bed at about 8:30 Wednesday night (also good for the jet lag). Thursday morning I immediately notified maintenance that my internet was out and sat and waited for maintenance to come. And waited. By 11 I started sending emails to see if the maintenance crew was still coming and, if so, when. And waited some more. Around 2 pm the internet guys showed up and said they couldn't fix the problem and that we'd need Omantel to come out. Problem is it took Omantel 6 weeks to show up when I first moved here, so that news was pretty depressing.
No one ever showed up to deal with the mold or even let me know that no one was coming, so I sat around the house all day Thursday waiting. With no internet, tv or phones.
Then, Thursday evening I noticed that the water coming out of the sinks was only a trickle. I thought it was weird but didn't think much of it until I tried to shower on Friday and couldn't because only a trickle was coming out of all of my faucets. I called maintenance again on Friday and when they showed up Saturday they said my water pump was broken. No ETA on when it would be fixed and no sympathy for the fact that I couldn't shower. When I tried to impress upon the maintenance guy how much I needed my shower to work he looked at me and said "Get a bucket."
So by Saturday I was cranky and, for the first time, homesick. Nothing was working in my house, I wanted a shower and to watch tv or call home or any of the other things I'd planned to do with my four days off after Japan. And I was frustrated that nothing was getting fixed and that the best I could learn is that things would be fixed soon, inshallah. And we all know what that means.
Yesterday I spent most of the day bitching to HR and at the house with maintenance showing them everything that's falling apart in my house (which was apparently constructed using chewing gum and duct tape). Apparently the water pump will be fixed today, but I'm not holding my breath. No clue when the internet will be fixed. But at least HR is on it now and if things don't get fixed then maybe I'll get to move to a different house that would hopefully have somewhat less maintenance issues (although apparently the quality of construction over here is so poor that almost all of the houses have mold issues, not to mention the myriad of other things wrong). I also have the option of staying at a hotel until the water is fixed, but I hate to leave my cat at the house alone.
But, in the meantime, the homesickness has hung around. I don't miss Houston per se, I miss the ease and efficiency of living in the US. If my internet went out Wednesday night back home it would have been fixed by Thursday. Same with the water. Or at least you'd get reasonable ETAs from vendors rather than hearing inshallah.
I think I'm just cranky and am really looking forward to my visit back to Houston this weekend. I'm only going for a week (Friday to Friday), but hopefully that's enough time to rejuvenate me. Or at least drink as much Diet Coke as humanly possible in seven days.
* Don't worry, I haven't been stinky and unwashed for the last four days. I have a trickle of water that comes out of the spigot in the shower, which is about two feet above the ground. While it's humiliating and uncomfortable, I have figured out how to bathe myself while squatting/sitting on the floor of my shower. Washing my hair is a bitch and a half, so I'm really stretching the number of days I can go between hair washings, but at least I'm mostly presentable.
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