For the past several days, there has been a maddeningly annoying drip drip in my bathroom that I couldn't seem to find the source. Today I went to wash my hands and my faucet shot water from all directions and made a very loud rumbling somewhere near a jet breaking the sound barrier.
My bathroom
In a few seconds time, there is a good half inch of standing water on the floor and I'm noticing that it's getting increasingly hot. Soon my glasses are fogged up. I yank the handle on the faucet (leaving my fingerprints forever burned into the melting metal) to the "cold" setting only to find out that my faucet now comes equipped with "Burn Your Fingers Off" and "Split Your Own Atoms." I run to the building manager's office...and it's dark. Turns out they're on holiday. Great, say I. Rumble, rumble say my pipes.
One of the Chinese staff girls who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time helped me call a plumber who came in and then....couldn't speak a word of Mandarin. This plumber only spoke a regional dialect. Imagine you call a plumber and you get Billy Bubba from Kentucky and people in Kentucky all speak Pidgeon English with every third vowel removed and backwards word order with a different set of vocabulary for everything and you get a vague idea of the situation. Fortunately, same staff girl (who really should have gone home when she had the chance) happened to be from that region and spent the better part of an hour relaying everything he said from their local dialect to English (for me) and Mandarin (for the Beida official who came by to see what was going on.)
The plumber was able to stop the leak but at that time my room was doing its best Yangtze River impression. I was able to get that cleaned up and nothing was damaged too badly but I gotta wait a few days until I can get the whole problem fixed.
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