as much as i'll be sad to no longer live in the immediate vicinity of a friend (all my cambridge friends except greg have graduated; my other friends live in various other places far afield)... i cannot fucking wait to no longer be living in college accommodation. (long ramble about... all of the everything. under the read more.)
the weekends are safe because i know no one is going to suddenly burst into my room. usually maintenance give you 48 hours notice (that is, "we'll be coming to fix something within the next 48 hours" which is ... not helpful), and not only can i not hear them knocking on my door if i have headphones on*, but i also cannot hear them if i'm in the bathroom, because it's just too far from the door to hear. i have been walked in on in the toilet twice because of this, and have often had maintenance walk into my room, startle me at my desk, and then go "oh, sorry, we did knock". they just assume, if they don't get a response, that you must be out, and they have keys so they just come in to do whatever they need to do.
[*i need headphones on because my windows are single-glazed and my bedroom is right above the kitchens and above where the deliveries are made to the kitchens almost every day, so there is constant noise including loud vans and lorries in the mornings and also just general noise most of the day, and then students having loud conversations under my windows at night. i get woken up nearly every morning between 6 and 8; if i wear earplugs to bed they hurt my ears and wake me up around 5 or 6 anyway, so what i have to do is just let myself be woken up, put in earplugs, then try to go back to sleep.]
NORMALLY the weekends are safe. yesterday, i had someone knock on my door asking if i had set off the disability alarms. my room has disability alarms because it's intended for students who are... well, it's unclear actually. the bathroom is laid out to be wheelchair accessible, i think (though i'm not 100% sure) you could fit a wheelchair around the rest of the room - i'm not sure about the kitchen*. however, it's clearly not suitable for someone who actually needs to use a wheelchair, because it's on the first floor, not the ground floor. not only is that already not allowed - you can't have a student who uses a wheelchair anywhere but the ground floor in case there's a fire (even if there are lifts) - but also i'm not entirely sure if there even is a working lift.
[*the kitchen is the reason i'm in this room at all - i don't have an oven but i have a hob, microwave, sink, fridge, and freezer - it's the only room in the entire college with access to an individual kitchen. the college nurses argued for me to get this room (after confirming no one else needed it for more serious accessibility reasons) because, for autism reasons mainly, every time i shared a kitchen with other students i ended up simply not eating because it was so deeply stressful and unpleasant.]
anyway, no i did not set off the disability alarms, but evidently the porters were getting alerts so one of them came and knocked on my door yesterday to check. i hadn't heard any sound, so had no idea anything had happened. but i pressed the reset button in the bathroom and all was fine.
but then. this morning, while i'm in bed scrolling tumblr trying to wake myself up, i get another knock at the door. a porter apologises for waking me but says the alarms are going off - there must be a fault, she needs to come in and reset them. apparently, they've recently updated the system and something's not working properly.
why? well she didn't mention this, but i have a theory. a few weeks ago, i did accidentally trigger the disability alarm. there are two, one in the bathroom and one by my bed. i took off the cardigan i was wearing, threw it on the bed, but missed, and happened to catch the string of the alarm in the process. a loud alarm went off outside my bedroom door. i panicked, trying to figure out how to turn it off (i didn't know about the reset button yet), and texted my friend who was in this room before me. eventually i gave up, and went to plodge to ask the porters for help. a porter followed me up to my room, fiddled with the alarm, couldn't work out how to make the noise stop, so said he'd call maintenance. i sat in my room for half an hour with my headphones on to block out the noise, and then the maintenance guy showed up and told me about the reset button.
i thought that was the end of things, but the following morning i got an email from the college nurse - she'd been made aware of the "incident" (i guess they have to make reports about pretty much everything?) and wanted to check i was alright because it sounded stressful. i think in that email i mentioned that no one had actually come to see why the alarm was going off - that is, if i had pulled it for real and been injured or something, i would have just been stuck there indefinitely. (if it wasn't in that email, i did also mention it to a tutor i happened to be talking to a while later - not as a complaint, just came up in conversation). sooo someone realised this was bad, and they updated the alarm system so the porters actually get notified if the alarm is pulled. i assume.
anyway, at some point today someone's gonna come and look at the alarms, apparently, to try to solve whatever the fault is. great. "great" is both genuine (i want the issue solved) and sarcastic (i don't want to deal with people being in and out of my room).
so that's the first thing. ... i mentioned my bathroom is wheelchair accessible. well, part of what that means is that the shower is not in a little cubicle, but rather it's just a shower head pointed at the floor. now, i'm pretty sure there are better ways of doing this, but i don't use a wheelchair so i'm not going to try to say what those better ways are. what i do know is that having nothing around the shower to keep the water in, means that the water does not... stay in. every single time i shower, i have to mop the bathroom floor. according to my friend, there used to be a gate thing around the shower, but by the time i moved in they'd got rid of that and never replaced it.
on friday, the shower drain got blocked. not sure how, i didn't do anything. but around 4:30pm, after walking back from town and before going to my choir rehearsal, i showered, and i noticed the water was draining verryyy slowly, and i thought "shit, the bathroom's gonna be very wet", but what i couldn't see from behind the shower curtain was that not only was the bathroom getting very wet, it was flooding. and so was the kitchen, which is right next to the bathroom. i don't mean "the floor was wet". i mean there were a few milimetres of water across the entire floor in both rooms. i used every towel i had and the dirty bedsheets i hadn't got round to washing yet to mop the floor, and it did almost nothing. (i made a maintenance report, but they only come to deal with non-emergency stuff mon-fri 9-5, and it was already gone 5:30 on friday by the time i made the report) i also used my t-shirts etc from my laundry bag to try to soak up some of the water.
(then i tried to do a load of laundry, but in the five minutes between going down to the laundry room, seeing there was a free machine, going back to my room and returning to the laundry room with my laundry, someone else got there first. i hate communal laundry.)
today is sunday, and most of the floor is finally dry (apart from a few puddles in my bathroom from when i - very very carefully and quickly - showered last night), except for a large puddle remaining in the kitchen. however, my slippers are still wet, and for sensory reasons i can't wear just socks or have bare feet in the kitchen, so i have to put shoes on every time i need to use the kitchen. i have a couple of cardboard boxes i was saving for packing to go home, which were on the floor - they'll be unusable, but i haven't been able to face even looking at them.
i'm tired, and stressed, and can never quite relax living here. i know when i move back in with my parents i'll probably be woken up by them and my sister, that various things in our house don't work properly, etc, but at least if someone knocks on my door when i'm still half-asleep i'm not a) opening the door to a total stranger and b) i know they won't just barge in assuming i'm out. (my bedroom door locks, you can unlock it from the outside - it's just a chain lock i made at school when i was like 14, so you can stick your fingers through the door and mess with it until it opens - but you can immediately tell that i'm inside and therefore unless it's an emergency you won't bother)
