Okay, I’m coming up on my third month in a new house.
I was hoping that by now I’d be getting used to its many eccentricities. No such luck.
The light switches are all installed helter-skelter. I still habitually knock them into the “down” position when I exit a room. Since I do this as I’m passing the threshold, very often (especially in the daytime) I don’t notice that I’ve actually turned the lights on, illuminating an empty room. Sometimes for days, if I’m heading out for a bit. “Down” is “off”, dammit. Both the outside light switches are installed upside down, too. How many times have I gone to bed and found that damned light shining in through my window? Why? Because I took the time to turn it “off.”
Okay, this week I’ll make the time to take them all out of their housings and reorient them properly. I can deal. I’ve already bought new AC outlets for most of the rooms, anyway, to fix the skid-row whore outlets that are in place now. (When you plug something into them, the plug simply falls out again. Whaa?)
The plumbing is not so easily remedied, and is even more infuriating. My shower? The “Hot” tap is on the right. Even better, both taps are marked with a “C.” This means that, whenever I find that the water is either “a little too cold,” or “a little too hot,” it usually ends up being fucking freezing or painfully scalding before it gets adjusted properly, because 35 years of knowing which tap is the “hot” one tends to free people up to recklessly turn those knobs without giving a lot of thought to it. I’ve developed a memnomic for those rare times that I remember that I live in topsy-turvy land before adjusting the water: “Not Hagbard Celine, but Charlton Heston.” Yes, thank you so much, drunken plumbing installer, for obliging me to think of Charlton fucking Heston in the shower. I hate your fucking guts.
I’ve saved the most inexplicable one for last. My bathroom sink. By god, the “hot” and “cold” taps are where you’d expect them to be. (Hey, 50/50 chance, right?) So what could be the matter? What potential for confusing cognitive dissonance remains?
It’s the “cold” tap. You turn it counter-clockwise to close it. This means that, the usual decisive twist that is employed to shut off the flow of water invariably results in a firehose-strength torrent, which, combined with a perversely shallow basin, conspires to soak the front of my pants. If I’m lucky, I’ll just be able to hang around for a bit until it dries, but frequently I find that the water is combined with enough residual soap or toothpaste that I have to change my pants.a
How is this even possible? Every faucet that I’ve ever taken apart has one way you can assemble it. (Leaving aside that they usually come correctly-assembled from the supplier.) You’ve got the washer end of the screw, and the handle end. How the fuck do you contrive to make the washer move closer to the seat when you turn the handle counter-clockwise? Has a custom part been hand-tooled just to frustrate me when I’m trying to get my ass out of the house? What the bloody blue fuck?
$1850, if anyone’s curious. I love renting in Vancouver.
