When Good Chickens Go Bad

The stories about my new apartment are plentiful. I enjoy sharing them with you all, so here’s another.

A little over a week ago, I was sitting on my couch watching TV. I glanced up for a second and noticed a crack in the ceiling. Is that new? I wondered. Has that always been there? I totally forgot, so I moved on.

A few minutes later, the wife and I were preparing to go out to see a movie. I was in another room when I heard her say, “Why is the light fixture brown? What is that?”

I came into the dining room area and looked at the light fixture. It’s a fixture that has three globes with a light bulb in each globe. One globe had a brown line in it – a brown line that was not there earlier in the day.

So she grabbed a ladder and took off the globe. Water. The globe was filled with brown water.

“Sick!” we both yelled. What the hell? We both freaked out – we had no idea where the water came from or why it was in our light fixture or why we weren’t being electrocuted right then and there for touching the globe. She put the globe in the sink while I called maintenance. They promised to send someone right over.

I then ran upstairs to see if our neighbor living directly over us noticed a leak. Until then, we knew nothing of our upstairs neighbors except that the way they walked around made it sound like a small army of sumo wrestlers lived up there with them.

I knocked on their door. Suddenly, I entered an episode of COPS! as a shirtless man answered the door. He fit the mold of how large I had thought our upstairs neighbors were in comparison to the ratio of noise and floor-creaking when they walked around.

“Um, hi, I’m your downstairs neighbor.”

“Uhn,” he grunted, not seeming excited about knowing a new neighbor, nor introducing himself. So much for my hopes that they might bring us down a “Welcome New Neighbors!” cake or casserole.

“Okay, um, did you notice any leaks in your apartment? Because we just had a light fixture fill with water?”

“Nope,” he grunted.

That ended the conversation.

I ran back downstairs to wait for our emergency maintenance folks to arrive.

An hour later, there came a knock at the door. Maintenance had arrived. The guy walked in, we showed him our new crack and the globe o’ water. He went upstairs to see if they’d had a leak. Of course, the upstairs neighbor wasn’t there.

So the maintenance guy told us it’s probably the neighbor’s washing machine leaking. He said he’d contact the neighbor the next day (Monday), make any needed repairs then, and let us know how it went.

Monday evening rolls around. I ask the wife if she’d heard anything. She said no.

We both go upstairs to ask the neighbor. Fortunately he was wearing a shirt this time.

“Hi, did maintenance stop by your place today?” we asked.

“Oh yeah, they did. Turns out I was just defrosting a chicken and it got a little out of hand,” he replied.

The wife and I responded with blank stares. How do you respond to a statement like that? So many questions pop into one’s head when given that line. Here they are, in no particular order because they’re all so closely related and involve the same amount of exasperation.

#1- How the frick were you defrosting a chicken that it caused a minor flood into our apartment?!

#2- How big was the chicken you were defrosting?!

#3- Did you just happen to forget about your freak chicken defrosting accident when I asked you last night if you noticed any leaks in your apartment?!

#4- What the $^&!?

#5- No, really, what the $*(&?

But, what we said was:
“O-okay.”

We then went back downstairs. I began thinking that I was just being supplied with these experiences because someone really enjoyed hearing about the weird-ass places I’ve lived in.

The next day at work, because the day before I had told my coworkers about our minor flooding, I had to explain to them what had caused it.

They’re still laughing. And so am I.