Power Struggle

A couple of days ago, I started a journal entry about what’s been going on here in the Sealand apartment:

One of the more exasperating things about all the little on-the-sly apartments one finds here in Sealand is how spit-and-tape they are when it comes to infrastructure.  They’re not slums, to be sure, but the back story on them always involves a homeowner in the 1960s deciding to subdivide his house from the 1940s, and then calling in his Uncle Bob sometime in the early 1980s to redo the plumbing and the electric, without any clear idea how Uncle Bob handled that, or any appreciation for the fact that his work might not last until The End of Time.  In my old apartment, this back story expressed itself via the leak under the bathroom floor that had rotted through the floorboards and dissolved all the tile grout, and via the built-in air conditioner that poured all its cold air directly down the front steps and out of the apartment, and via the five hot-neutral reverse-wired outlets.  In my current apartment, its full expression has been slow to coming, perhaps because I haven’t been settled enough to actually DO anything here until just recently.  But I discovered very quickly when I set up Eve that the majority of the household outlets aren’t grounded, don’t even have a three-prong face, which required me to run her power cord across the bedroom and plug it into the same outlet as the bedroom air conditioner.  And to this discovery, I have now added the additional discovery that the single outlet in the bathroom is on the very same breaker as Eve’s outlet (as are the outlet into which I was going to plug her originally, and the next-closest outlet on the bedroom wall.)  And the discovery that the entire kitchen-  refrigerator, gas range, overhead lighting, toaster and microwave (should I choose to plug those last two in)-  is on the same circuit breaker as the three outlets in the living room, into which all of the living room lighting is plugged.  And the living room air conditioner.  Which is no longer the 10-year old 5000 BTU piece of crap that came with the apartment, but a brand-spankin’-new five hundred dollar 12,000 BTU portable apartment unit, one that is actually up to the task of cooling an attic down to a reasonable temperature, so that my girlfriend doesn’t spend all of her time drenched in her own sweat and puking into my toilet.

I have discovered this, of course, because we keep blowing the breakers.  This would be a minor inconvenience in any normal, up-to-code scenario, but in UncleBobLand it’s a major hassle, because in UncleBobLand, the fuse box containing the breakers is never in any place accessible by me, the tenant.  In my old apartment, it was in the basement, and the basement was a second apartment, occupied by The Moron.  (The Moron was the tenant who replaced Postman;  he got his name because he had a heart attack down there one night [yes, literally, a heart attack] and didn’t want to have to pay for the ambulance, so instead he walked to the Dunkin Donuts in the middle of town, because he knew that was where all the cabbies hung out in the middle of the night, and he had one of them take him to the hospital.  And he lived.  My Dad, meanwhile, who got some of the best medical care that exists in a very timely fashion, bought the farm.  I choose to believe the Goddess is planning on using The Moron as a human shield to protect children against gunfire at some point in the future.)  He was often home, but not always;  he would occasionally go out and shamble the streets for a few hours, doing…  something.  (We could never figure out what [and still can’t.])  Flora the landlady, whose numerous faults mercifully did not include a blindness to the limitations of a 1940s power grid,  pointed out where the spare key to his apartment was hanging, in case the breaker should ever blow while neither he nor she was at home, but the one time that scenario ever occurred and I went in to trip it, I forgot to turn off the light I had switched on to allow me to see the fuse box, giving away that I had been inside the place, and he threw a hairy shit-fit.  So in terms of the level of personal stress and interpersonal hostility involved, it wasn’t any more efficient than simply waiting until he or the landlady got home and asking them through my clenched, smiling teeth to do it for me.

(He is, by the way, still happily in that basement;  the new landlord who bought Flora’s house and moved into it, threw me out, but not him.  So who’s the moron?)

I then launched into a description of the various ways and conditions under which we had blown the breakers the first three times (If you’re not terribly interested in the gory details you can skim this part):

In the new apartment (“new”), the fuse box is, of course, again in the basement, and the basement is only accessible from an interior staircase inside Widow Heathcliff’s first-floor home, or via an exterior door within her prominently fenced-off back yard.  The first time the breakers blew, it was because I was in a tizzy trying to clean up before Dragonia got here, and I foolishly plugged the vacuum into that same outlet Eve and the bedroom air-conditioner were both using.   The short took down the bedroom, but nothing else, and Widow Heathcliff, when I knocked on her door, seemed no more befuddled than usual.  So she took me down into the basement-  a space I only know how to shorthand by saying that it looked precisely like every other long-since-dead suburban husband’s workshop I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of them!)-  showed me the box, indicated the general location of some fuses that were important to the operation of the refrigerator “in case I needed them” (and how would I get down there again and get to them unless she let me in?) and let me throw the breaker, making it clear in the process that while she knew where the basic elements were, and which breakers controlled the second floor, she had no idea what the individual switches actually did, or which position they were supposed to be in.  The second time the breakers blew, they blew for the identical reason, only this time it was Dragonia who had plugged the vacuum into that outlet, trying to clean up the place while I was at work.  That was embarrassing, but could have gone much worse than it actually did, since it gave Dragonia an excuse to introduce herself to Widow Heathcliff and possibly allay some of her potential fears about a house guest sharing the apartment for 6 weeks plus.  They talked and the power got reset, and we became very careful to turn everything off when the vacuum was running, and no further incidents involving that appliance or the bedroom occurred thereafter.

The third time the breakers popped was where everything started to go south.   Dragonia turned on my tiny microwave, which was plugged into precisely the same outlet as it had been since the day I moved in, and the whole kitchen went out, for no clear reason-  possibly because the addition of that aforementioned ancient air-conditioner to the circuit had already set up the fail conditions, and I just never use the microwave, or possibly because it and the fridge compressor and the microwave all went on at once.  The kitchen had previously been the subject of some small contention regarding the lighting, a discussion I thought innocuous at the time, but which in retrospect now seems ominous:  the illumination from the sole overhead fixture was weak, and largely inadequate for my cooking needs, but the ceiling was high, and there were no drapes or other fabric to cause any danger, so I pulled in one of my old torch halogens and set it up as a stopgap to keep myself from going blind until I could figure out what to do.   I figured maybe I could install track lighting over the sink at some point.  Before that idea got out of the planning stages, however, Widow Heathcliff somehow found out I was using the halogen, either because she observed me in the kitchen from outside the house, or because someone else did and told her.  When she did, she found an excuse to talk to me, then changed the subject to the lighting and treated me to a meandering soliloquy that boiled down to, “I used to have a bunch of those, but then one of the men in my family told me they were a fire hazard, so I got rid of them of all, and I don’t want you using them, because I’m afraid you’re going to burn down my house.”  And then told me she was sending her electrician up there to put in a new overhead lighting unit, so I wouldn’t have to use it.  The electrician, when he got there, didn’t put in a new lighting unit, or track lighting:  he just changed the 40 watt bulbs that had been in the overhead lighting unit to brighter ones, making me look and feel like a total rube, as it had never once occurred to me to check that.  Who would put 40 watt bulbs in the kitchen, the one place in the house where you really need good light, unless that was the maximum the unit was rated for?  (Oh!  Or unless every appliance in two rooms is foolishly wired to one breaker…)

This new shutdown fried one of the aforementioned refrigerator fuses, which were sitting in a tiny two socket box of their own, in the wall right next to the refrigerator.  It also, unfortunately, occurred again while I was at work, which had a double effect:  it caused me to blip over the incident without paying enough attention to all the details of what had happened, and I suspect, caused the landlady to start down the road of thinking, The tenant has now left someone else alone in the apartment who I have no power over and cannot be trusted not to fuck the place up. Dragonia is asleep at the time of this writing, so I can’t refresh my memory on the particulars, but I seem to recall her saying that the Widow made a weird, confusing statement about how she would have to go out and buy more of those fuses before anything could happen, implying that nothing would be done about it in the immediate future, and then replaced the fuses anyway, and the power was reset.

I had intended to continue with a description of the fourth time the breakers blew, and everything went to hell in a handbasket, but a lot of things happened relatively quickly after that, and my stamina for retelling this story is limited, given that I’ve already recounted it in detail to several family members.  Suffice to say that it involved the two of us living without any power in the kitchen or living room for two days because one of those two refrigerator fuses was blown again, but looked completely normal;  the refrigerator being powered via a 100 foot electrical cord run to one of the outlets that was still live, so the food wouldn’t spoil;  the landlady yelling at me that I was going to burn her house down, and that in 30 years they’d never had this problem, and that I had too much stuff plugged in;  her daughter telling me the same thing in politer and icier terms (all of this during the continuing West of the Rivers heat wave).  And ended with them getting an electrician up here, who I insisted come during a time when I was home and would be present to ask him questions myself.  He turned out to be the one who had done all their previous work on the house;  he spent some time asking me questions about what had and hadn’t been plugged in, and asking them questions as he refamiliarized himself with what he had done to address all those problems they hadn’t been having over the past 30 years, and he checked the amperage on the fuse box in her basement (which I was not there for, and during which time I assume he had some private discussions with them.)  He concluded that the safest and most efficient thing to do would be to take the ancient redundant fuses out of the kitchen circuit, and to get the air-conditioning in the living room and the bedroom off the existing breakers and onto lines of their own, by running two new 20-ampere lines up into the apartment with their own outlets.  The work would be relatively straightforward, and take less than a day to do, but the earliest he could come back and do it was Tuesday.  Which was fine by me.  So he departed, claiming that he would return this coming Tuesday.

On Thursday, I went down to the mailbox to search for a package Dragonia was expecting, and discovered a small brown slip of paper indicating that a certified letter was waiting for me at the Post Office.  On Friday I went to the Post Office and picked up the letter, and discovered that the landlady is evicting me from the apartment.  I have, as required by law, until the end of September to get out.

Subsequent to this, I have made the following decisions:

• I am moving out of Sealand, the way I should have done the first time.
• I am moving into a cookie-cutter “garden-style” apartment complex, where the landlord is a faceless corporation, with no direct representation on the premises, where the wiring, plumbing and climate control will all be up to code, by law, (because the rental will be indisputably “on the books”) and where the various elements and controls associated with those systems will all be accessible within the apartment.

I hope to stick to these decisions.