Water, water everywhere

We had another bunch of snow this week, such that I was clearing the driveway each night and then the next morning. On Friday they were promising 4-8 inches of lake effect snow, but it never materialized. I felt cheated.

This weekend it’s sort of cold, but the sun came out brilliantly on Saturday afternoon, prompting me to wear sunglasses when I walked Tank. He loves the snow, incidentally. He’ll throw himself into the deepest drift he can find, and enjoys snapping up mouthfuls of the stuff as we walk along. I told him he might find a chewey surprise left by another of his species if he keeps that up, but he was undeterred.

In other news, we had a flood in the office this week. On Monday we noticed water coming under the door of an equipment room where electrical and heating equipment is housed. The water kept coming until about half our space was covered with it. Several offices had soggy carpeting, the whole career library floor was soaked. It even started moving into our storage room. The housekeeping people came with all their equipment and sucked up all the water, shampooed the carpets and left by 2pm.

They had just left when a pipe snapped in my own personal office, and brown yucky water poured out, flooding the floor and moving into the space outside my door. Now, you must understand that the floor is part of my filing system. Anything on the carpet was soaked, but fortunately, I don’t keep very important stuff down there.

So we called the cleaning people back, and they sucked out the water and treated the carpet with antimicrobial solutions and then left. The carpet was still very stinky, though, so I called them back to redo it. We’ll see how it is on Monday morning, but when I left on Friday, it wasn’t too bad. Someone else’s office that, didn’t even have as much water as I did, had an awful stench on Friday.

It’s all an academic exercise until it’s your own office that is involved. I moved all my furniture out including a big filing cabinet and couch, along with two small filing cabinets and all my chairs. All that is in there is a bookcase and my desk, which is covered with junk that belongs in drawers somewhere. Or on the floor in my filing system. The building engineers have to come back and check their repairs before I can put my space back together again. Every time I look for something, it’s in the hallway somewhere.

Turns out the University thought they could save money by turning off the heat over the winter break. The result was that the water pipe that supplies the sprinkler system froze and broke. My boss had a geranium cutting in a Cool Whip bowl of water in his office sitting on the radiator. The bowl was frozen solid.