Part 1
“… help of family and friends, social state, free resources, lax law enforcement may help when it comes to holding down-town home in given post – Soviet country”
Buying an urban home in the post – Soviet country is like marrying into extended family. After finding perfect match and happily tying the knot, various relatives might appear with their unexpected ways of life, some of them bossy and in need of support. Similarly, after taking possession of down-town home of your dream in the post – Soviet country you might acquire unexpected expenses and unwanted way of life. That is of public utilities and municipal providers of buildings’ maintenance services.
Usual emergency in down-town
At precisely 2.30 a.m. the 8th of August, 2016, peaceful sleep of the owner of down-town home was interrupted by the sound of water-fall coming from under the hard-wood floor behind her bed. Luckily, her son was alert in nearby room, enjoying PC network game. So he instantly made right strategic multitask moves, calling dispatchers of emergency water utility service, relocating valuables as high as possible and trying to awaken his mother.
The latter was the trickiest part – she got used to sleep under golden youth’ night drag- racing roar. Anyway, musing about “I know why SWAT’ units operate byearly mornings”, gamer’ mother took a night watch legal shift – to summon emergency water utility service. Needless to say, dispatchers dully recorded emergency call, but that meant nothing – overstretched utility emergency was expected to arrive 5 hours later. As dispatchers instructed on “everything ‘ll be nice, water finally shall leak into soil anyway”.
What are family and friends for…
As nobody except water utility service was authorized to switch off water supply from the building, it was only the way to stop water gushing under 10 Atmospheres from the broken water utility pipe under the ground floor of the lawyer’s flat in down town. Before the lawyer could put all force of her skills on dispatchers, she ‘s got advice from her friend, the engineer, who with family lives on another end of the city, and whom she called at 3 a.m. those morning, sending him professional picture of the pipe leak and flat communications.
” a little from here and a little from there, organizing united response to emergency alert, preventing further disaster”
This photo was made by her son – the photographer (the gamer day-time job). The engineer, family man with young child (his family was awaken by frantic call), estimated that within 2 hours after the break the water shall flood the flat. So with gods’ help the lawyer got water emergency service to stop the water fountain, and flat near missing flooding at 4.00 a.m. From this moment entire 60- flat 5-store down town building stood peacefully without tape water.
By 12 a.m. the same August day the heat approached 30 degree C, with no prospect of replacing 56-years old utterly rusted water pipe, and still no running water…
To be continued….
