rentertainment

We are renting our home. Our house is held together with duct tape. In late December, Ralph was sitting across from me at our table and complained that whenever he sat there, water dripped on him. There was a bubble the ceiling above the table, so I poked it with my finger and water gushed out. We called our landlord after the holidays and he patched up the roof. We suspected it was more a "pipe" issue than a "roof" issue, and we were right because his roof patching didn't change a thing, even after he patched it the 2nd and 3rd time over the month of January. In mid-February, when we told him the latest roof patch hadn't done the trick, he returned a few days later with a funnel, plastic piping, paper clips, and a yogurt container. Items which, in the hands of the incompetent are nearly worthless, but in the hands of a craftsman landlord become tools of mystic wonder:






Here is the complete solution (you may need to tilt your head):




If you can't tell from the picture, now if water drops from the ceiling, it will no longer hit Ralph (or anyone else) because it just goes in the funnel. Where does it go from there? Down the plastic tubing. But then where does the water go, just on the floor? Heavens no. It goes in the yogurt container. But how is the tubing kept on the wall so that it doesn't just flail around the room? That's easy. It is paper clipped to the screw he installed in the wall. At the time of the installation, our landlord had run fresh out of duct tape, other wise he would have duct-taped the tubing to the funnel--and he recommended we did so, admittedly that would have made for an even cleaner solution. But doesn't Olive like to play with the tubing? And doesn't Oscar knock over the yogurt container full of nasty water? Yes, but we just yell at them.

At the installation in mid-February, we were promised the solution was "temporary." If you know a foreign language, or even some pidgin languages, you know that "temporary" can mean lots of things. For example, in Greece, it means "until after the holidays". Our landlord's use of 'temporary' means roughly: "until I get my hands on some more duct-tape". One could recommend that I fix it instead of waiting for the landlord, but remember we're renting, so we can't really be held that responsible.