Just another day at the apartment complex, the thing I hate most about my job as a maintenance man, is that you have to go on call for a whole week. Every place is different, some complex’s have a four week rotation, like where I work at, and then some have an every other week on call rotation. It all depends on how big the apartment complex is and how many technicians that you have. The newer apartments don’t get as many emergency calls as the old ones do of course, and of course the one that I work at is pushing 40 years old, so the plumbing is shot, and I am good to get about 5-10 plumbing emergencies every week that I go on call. Some of the calls come in the middle of the night, like at 3 a.m., it can be nerve wrecking.
Last rotation that I was on call I got woken up by the emergency phone at about 3 a.m., the resident had said that he had water pouring down from the ceiling. I of course tried to talk my way out of taking the call, but he had insisted that it was an emergency and needed immediate action, because the water was pouring from a light and his carpet was getting wet, great. So I have to bang on the residents door that lived above him and wake her up at 3:45 am in the morning, explain to her that she had a leak coming from her apartment and I had to take care of it immediately. Sure enough I went to the water heater and it was leaking from the bottom of the water heater, her carpet was also soaking wet. So I secured the water to the water heater and told her that I would be out first thing in the morning to replace it.
Well I thought that I had the shutoff valve turned all the way off, until 3 hours later, 7 am I get woken up again with a call, the resident with the bad water heater said her whole room was soaking wet, so I hauled ass over there, then again shut down on the shut off valve with some pliers. All of her crap was soaking wet, she was pissed, but then again I was pissed off too, seeing as how I barely got any damn sleep that night.
I had a similar situation a couple of months ago, this time I was woken up at 2:30 a.m., I was still drunk and after the 5th time the resident had called I had finally woken up to return the call. He was screaming that it was like Niagra falls in his hallway. He stated that the apartment above him was a vacant apartment, meaning that nobody lived there, so I went to the office and pulled a key for the vacant apartment, went upstairs and the toilet supply hose to the toilet was completely off. So a steady pressure of water was just sitting there pouring for about an hour or so. So I immediately secured the shut off valve and called the on-call carpet cleaner, who didn’t answer his phone after about 5 tries, probably drunk and passed out too. So I go to the shop and get the wet vac and started vacuuming the soaked carpets up, both upstairs and downstairs. Then I told the guy that we will have the carpet extractors out there first thing in the morning to extract the water from the carpet. He was okay with that, the dude just wanted to get some rest anyway.
So if you decide you want to make a career being a handyman or maintenance man for an apartment complex these are some of the things that are going to happen, there is no way around it. You will get calls in the middle of the night sooner or later, and once you do, sooner or later it is going to happen again so be prepared. While I was writing this I had to do 2 a/c calls, but it is only 7 PM right now, most of the time the calls stop around this time. But if you get a call after, you know that it is most likely an emergency.
maintenance technician, emergency on call, maintenance man
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