四海为家

A part of a tube that feeds water into our washing machine broke and fell off this morning as I was doing laundry, and the water must have gushed out onto the floor for a good twenty minutes before I noticed the odd sound of flowing water and discovered the flooded kitchen floor. To me it looked like a job for a repairman, but our local 保安 assured me that he could fix it for me, all I needed was to buy a new piece of tubing to replace the old one.

The security guards for our building know us well by now (there was that one time when the lock to our front door broke, we couldn’t get back in through the door, and after a locksmith had spent hours tinkering with the door and we had spent the night in a hotel, the police finally had to come with a rope ladder and lower themselves down from our neighbor’s balcony, enter through the window, and open the lock from the inside… and another time when a fuse was blown, but my roommate couldn’t find the fuse box, and the security guards convinced her that all of the electrical wiring for that side of the apartment would need to be replaced, which the landlord luckily cleared up for us before any drastic measures were taken…).

This time the 保安 really did know what he was talking about, and when I came back with the new tubing, he put everything back together for me, and even got rid of the drip that we’ve had from the washing machine ever since we moved into the apartment. I learned some useful vocabulary from the experience (“screwdriver” might come in handy in the future), and was left with a warm fuzzy feeling over how friendly and helpful our security guards are. Sometimes I suspect they’re extra nice to us because they take pity on the hapless foreigners who have somehow ended up in their building, but either way, it’s nice to know that there’s someone to turn to the next time I find 4 cms of water on the kitchen floor!