Megorious

Since the Brookline post office can’t seem to get their shit together and deliver our mail in a timely and orderly fashion, I have to read The New Yorker online most of the time now. Frankly, it’s rather annoying. I paid for a subscription but haven’t received an issue in almost three weeks. And I know no one is stealing them because the people that live in my building (read: dumb bitches) only subscribe to celebrity gossip magazines and Crate and Barrel catalogues.

We’ve been having issues with our mail for quite some time. It started last summer when our mailman lost the key to our lobby door. (To this day our landlord, The Hamilton Company, still hasn’t taken action to rectify that issue.) Without access to the mailboxes, the mailman just leaves the mail on the front steps of our building for us to sort through ourselves. The mailman still doesn’t have a key but now our front door is broken and doesn’t lock (another issue The Hamilton Company hasn’t taken care of) but even with building access the mailman seems to only deliver mail two or three times a week. We’ll go days without mail and then one day open up the mailbox to find everything jammed and crumpled up inside. My Netflix envelopes haven’t been the same since. Magazines don’t fit in the mailbox so the mailman just drops them in the church pew magazine rack with all of the junk mail, and let me tell you, sorting through all that crap is a real treat. The other day, there was a spider.

Anywho, back to the original point of this post….
The New Yorker has a little piece by Simon Rich that’s quite entertaining: What I imagined the people around me were saying when I was…

Did you know that the United States Postal Service has no official motto? It’s true! The famous mantra, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” appears in the works of Herodotus and describes the expedition of the Greeks against the Persians under Cyrus, about 500 B.C. The Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers, and the sentence describes the fidelity with which their work was done.
Now you know…

So after the heat started to smother the apartment, I decided to call The Hamilton Company back. Luckily they have a 24-hour maintenance hotline. The person I spoke to this time told me that they went to 143 Street but there was no issue. So, I kinda lost it, because it’s not 143 Street, it’s 145 Street! (We have this issue almost every time we call for maintenance.)

About an hour later I finally got a call from some maintenance guy. This was the first he had heard of the heat being on in our building but did add that they had a similar problem earlier in the evening at 143. He asked me to go to one of the radiators so that I could describe how the heat was coming out. Seriously.

About another hour later some guy showed up. As if he didn’t believe our numerous calls throughout the day, he said he had to see (or feel) for himself. He walked over to the radiator in the living room and placed his hand over it. Then I said, “Tell me, can you feel it?”

The heat is on… In our apartment!

In the latest display of incompetence and negligence by our lord of the land, The Hamilton Company, the boiler in our building was fired up on this, the last day of May. They can turn the heat on the when it’s warm outside but in the dead of December they can’t seem to get the heat pumping. Currently it is hotter inside our apartment than it is outside – a truly remarkable feat!

I called maintenance a few moments ago and got to talk with the always angry, rude, and eternally pregnant secretary.

ME: Yes, I’m calling from 145 Street. The heat is on in our building. It shouldn’t be. It’s May.
HER: It shouldn’t be on. Are you sure?
ME: Yes. I’m standing over the radiator now. Steam is rising out of it.
HER: But is it hot?
ME: Yes. Steam usually implies heat.
HER: Okay. 345 Street.
ME: Actually, it’s 145 Street.
HER: Oh. 145? Didn’t your roommate call a couple of hours ago?
ME: Yes. The heat was on then too.
HER: Then you know we’ve already been made aware of the issue?
ME: I wanted to make sure something was being done because it’s hot as hell in here.
HER: Someone is working on the boiler as we speak.
ME: Great. So, if I walked down into the basement, someone would be there?
HER: Yes sir.

There was no one in the basement. I knew there would be no one in the basement. This is exactly what happened back on Thanksgiving in 2005. The heat was not working and it was freezing outside. I was assured, after I woke up shivering at two in the morning, that someone was down there fixing the boiler. There wasn’t then either. For the record, it took them more than a week to fix that problem.

Sauna anyone?