Meet Raul, our site "superintendent"—a job title that suggests competence and authority yet applies to him like the word "clean" applies to our Downstairs Kitchen. Raul is, in fact, our Less-Than-Super Unhandy Man. He lives on-site, not in some dignified superintendent's apartment, but in a rather large, permanent camper trailer parked deep in the backyard next to a storage shed.
You'd assume living in the epicenter of the WTF: What The Fiasco grounds means he's constantly identifying and fixing problems. You would be hilariously wrong. Raul is merely the last, most useless link in a Byzantine chain of command. Before he can lay a hand on anything—even to change a lightbulb—we must first navigate a bureaucratic process to get the landlord's attention. The man is not a super; he's a highly paid witness.
Take, for instance, the legendary Sump Pump Incident.
The sump pump, designed to keep the basement from turning into an aquarium, drains directly onto the cracked concrete patio, which had been designated as our communal BBQ area. Predictably, the water pooled in massive, stagnant puddles before slowly—very slowly—seeping into the cracks. During one memorable summer cookout, this setup provided us with entertainment in the form of hordes of biting bugs hatching directly from the patio cracks and immediately joining the party.
The obvious, low-cost solution would be to extend the drainpipe a few feet to the street or the fence line.
The actual solution, delivered one year later, was to REMOVE THE ENTIRE PATIO.
Yes, instead of fixing the drainage, they simply eliminated the problem surface. Now, our once-cracked BBQ area is a field of mud. We are literally grilling in the dirt. One enterprising resident had to make a makeshift trench to guide the water toward the fence. And, naturally, the original pile of cracked concrete slabs—the very slabs that took a year to remove—sat in a growing pile for another six months before they were finally moved to a dumpster, where they have remained as a sort of monument to bureaucratic futility.
WTF: WHAT THE FIASCO!
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