Our (cold) war against the landlords.
First, a little context before I go off on one. We (my two flatmates and I) live in a house maintained by the Student Union housing office, which makes for the cheapest housing for students in town or on campus by a noticeable margin. However this is for a very good reason, as this is a suprisingly ramshackle house. I for example regularly have to put down salt around the edge of the room to stop the slugs that crawl in otherwise, despite being a house that opens out onto the street, and we all have to wipe our walls down for mould, at least until the mould took over the walls in the upstairs bedrooms which are now stripped of wallpaper. Mine I have to bleach occasionally to prevent it spreading onto my bookshelves, and books. Even the architecture of the place is off, with walls being shorter than one another, doors on at funny angles - even now i've just noticed that one of the plugs in my room is on diagonally.
I've taken to calling the house Howl's Moving Crapshack, but not entirely with endearment. This last incident has taken the cake, however.
This morning a man came round to fix the gaping hole in my bedroom floor (caused by me treading on a floorboard and it snapping and falling down into the suprisingly cavernous former cellar below) and while he was here he installed a carbon monoxide detector. When we moved in both I and my (safety inspector) father noted the absence of a detector, given our using a gas oven, especially with the dark stains on the wallpaper above the boiler typical of a monoxide leak. The Landlords (LUSU) said that we didn't need a detector since they legally didn't have to provide one and they "inspect regularly" (read: Once a term if we're un/lucky), and the stain was from a previous monoxide leak.
So the man installs the detector, saying that LUSU have decided to put them in all the houses, and goes. Ten hours later it goes off, and we have to call the gas emergency line. A guy appears very promptly, finds not much wrong that he can see but takes one look at the aforementioned stained walls and is promptly forced to turn our gas, and thus heating, cooker and hot water, off. Now at this point you'd expect us to ring LUSU to get someone to fix this problem straight away. This is where you'd be disappointed, since LUSU close their doors at 5pm on a Friday, and reopen at 10 on a Monday. So for the rest of this weekend and most likely all of monday (their response times are awful at best - it took nearly three weeks to get that hole fixed) we shall have no cooker, hot water or heat because LUSU .have been (A) Too lazy/cheap to repaint the wall after the gas leak, and to install a detector sooner and (B) Too inadequately prepared for emergencies.
F**ing Peachy.
I've taken to calling the house Howl's Moving Crapshack, but not entirely with endearment. This last incident has taken the cake, however.
This morning a man came round to fix the gaping hole in my bedroom floor (caused by me treading on a floorboard and it snapping and falling down into the suprisingly cavernous former cellar below) and while he was here he installed a carbon monoxide detector. When we moved in both I and my (safety inspector) father noted the absence of a detector, given our using a gas oven, especially with the dark stains on the wallpaper above the boiler typical of a monoxide leak. The Landlords (LUSU) said that we didn't need a detector since they legally didn't have to provide one and they "inspect regularly" (read: Once a term if we're un/lucky), and the stain was from a previous monoxide leak.
So the man installs the detector, saying that LUSU have decided to put them in all the houses, and goes. Ten hours later it goes off, and we have to call the gas emergency line. A guy appears very promptly, finds not much wrong that he can see but takes one look at the aforementioned stained walls and is promptly forced to turn our gas, and thus heating, cooker and hot water, off. Now at this point you'd expect us to ring LUSU to get someone to fix this problem straight away. This is where you'd be disappointed, since LUSU close their doors at 5pm on a Friday, and reopen at 10 on a Monday. So for the rest of this weekend and most likely all of monday (their response times are awful at best - it took nearly three weeks to get that hole fixed) we shall have no cooker, hot water or heat because LUSU .have been (A) Too lazy/cheap to repaint the wall after the gas leak, and to install a detector sooner and (B) Too inadequately prepared for emergencies.
F**ing Peachy.