I seemed to have angered a water demon
1) There's been a water drip above my desk at work for... years? At least long enough to remove all the varnish and warp the wood on one corner of the desk. Unfortunately, until recently the drip has only been active when I wasn't there to catch it, and it's very hard to fix a leak when you can't see where it's coming from (particularly in a basement with an unfinished ceiling and numerous pipes). This past month it started dripping during work hours and I was able to call maintenance and give them an actual leak location. They came in and rewrapped the insulation on the offending pipes... three times. It's still dripping, so I've got a trash can on my desk to keep important papers from getting soaked. Space is rather tight in the lab so it's difficult to get my desk away from the leak, although pretty soon I'm going to get desperate enough to try. Frankly, it's becoming a bit irritating to have water splashing down on my head at random intervals through out the day. But at least I know it's clean water.
2) Thirty minutes before I was suppose to present a talk to the other students in the department I walked into one of our lab rooms and got more water drops on my head. In this case I could see definite cracks in the ceiling where the water was coming through, so I went up a floor to talk to the folks in the lab there. Together we discovered that about half the room directly above the drip was covered in standing water. After a few unfruitful minutes of helping them search for the source I callously abandoned them to their soggy fate because I was fed up with water due to the fact that earlier that day...
3) A water filter in our lab spontaneously developed a crack in the lid. If this deluge had had the decency to happened while folks were around we could have taken care of it pretty quickly (not that there wouldn't have been a bit of swearing). However, the filter broke sometime between 3am, when security did a building check, and 5am, when the maintenance guys came in to find about 5 inches of water out in the hallway. They located the problem pretty quickly and flipped the water shut-off valve for the room. Unfortunately, the water shut-off valve for that particular lab room was broken. Luckily we had installed our own valve inside the lab room itself and that shut-off still worked. Then they started sweeping the water out of the building with brooms until the professional reinforcements with water pumps arrived. A couple of hours later I arrived at work (early, to get a bit of extra work done. Ha!) and started helping my lab mates figure out which of the electronics were underwater and if we could safely wade through to unplug things. Other students arrive to survey the damage and start salvaging (the flood covered two offices and lab rooms for three different groups) and we all spent the morning chucking wet papers and cardboard boxes, moving fans around to dry things off, wondering exactly how much of a problem it was if a power source had been completely submerged, and worrying because a number of the floor tiles were floating. But those rooms are the cleanest that they've been in at least twenty years. I'm definitely moving back to the desert first chance I get.
2) Thirty minutes before I was suppose to present a talk to the other students in the department I walked into one of our lab rooms and got more water drops on my head. In this case I could see definite cracks in the ceiling where the water was coming through, so I went up a floor to talk to the folks in the lab there. Together we discovered that about half the room directly above the drip was covered in standing water. After a few unfruitful minutes of helping them search for the source I callously abandoned them to their soggy fate because I was fed up with water due to the fact that earlier that day...
3) A water filter in our lab spontaneously developed a crack in the lid. If this deluge had had the decency to happened while folks were around we could have taken care of it pretty quickly (not that there wouldn't have been a bit of swearing). However, the filter broke sometime between 3am, when security did a building check, and 5am, when the maintenance guys came in to find about 5 inches of water out in the hallway. They located the problem pretty quickly and flipped the water shut-off valve for the room. Unfortunately, the water shut-off valve for that particular lab room was broken. Luckily we had installed our own valve inside the lab room itself and that shut-off still worked. Then they started sweeping the water out of the building with brooms until the professional reinforcements with water pumps arrived. A couple of hours later I arrived at work (early, to get a bit of extra work done. Ha!) and started helping my lab mates figure out which of the electronics were underwater and if we could safely wade through to unplug things. Other students arrive to survey the damage and start salvaging (the flood covered two offices and lab rooms for three different groups) and we all spent the morning chucking wet papers and cardboard boxes, moving fans around to dry things off, wondering exactly how much of a problem it was if a power source had been completely submerged, and worrying because a number of the floor tiles were floating. But those rooms are the cleanest that they've been in at least twenty years. I'm definitely moving back to the desert first chance I get.