Monday, October 19, 2009

If you can't stand the heat...

Samil just yelled to me, mid-shower, "Do you know the Yankees score?" Because, even though he knows I could not care less about baseball, I might be keeping up to date while he's away from his laptop.

Also, I now have Internet. Oddly, the FIOS guy we had come to fix everything rocked. He also thought we were just starting out in college, so he refused a tip and gave us about 50 bucks worth of stuff on the d/l. Unfortunately, I've been working way too much to put the Internet to good use.

It got cold here pretty fast in New Jersey, and our apartment was fairly cold. In case I wasn't aware of this, Samil made sure to mention it almost non-stop when I saw him. "I'm cold. I don't want to be cold. It's cold." Shocker: he decided to put on an extra blanket one night and wasn't cold. Still, the Cold theme persisted.

I'm not saying it wasn't cold, but when we moved in the old tenants told us their heating bills were through the roof, so personally, I'd rather throw on a sweatshirt than turn my apartment into Little Bahamas.

Still, its pretty absurd when my friend Steve stops by and tells us he looked up our house's worth on his company's Real Estate software. After giving us a number lower than we all expected, Samil's response was "It's probably because the house is so drafty."

This all came to its epic conclusion this weekend, when I get a call from Samil in the morning while at the bank. He was telling me that he turned the heat on the night before prior to leaving for a party. "When I came home there was no heat." I was aware both that there was no heat, since I was home asleep, and that he came home, because it sounded like he fell through the front door into the door into the living room, waking me up. "Okay," I tell him. "Well, I'm going to call the landlord." This seems somewhat reasonable as an isolated case. While responding to him vaguely I'm trying to add up the number of times we've called the landlord for silly little things in the last month and wonder if maybe we can figure this one out on our own. Eventually I say something to that effect, which he goes "I'm cold. I'm so cold I don't want to hang out here. I'm not even going to hang out here tonight because of this, or tomorrow."

This is where I become confused, not just because of the conversation but because the ATM was asking me funny questions. "You're not going to be home?" "No, its COLD!" "Then why do you want the heat on?" This question seems simple enough to me. I don't know, call me crazy. "because its cold." Oh, right.

An hour later or so I get a call from our landlord where she asks me to let the plumber in to look at the heat. "I'm not home." "You're not? Well, someone needs to be home." "Well, I'm at work. Where is Samil?" "I don't know. He's not answering his phone." Great. I don't get any calls back, and come home to a heated apartment.

Now it begins: the epic war of me trying to keep us from going broke from heating bills by lowering the thermostat and keeping doors shut. Wish me luck.

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