Out of order

Arrived home yesterday afternoon with arms full of groceries and an eagerness to transform them into something wonderful and found no one at home, no faucet fixtures on the kitchen sink, no way to access water in the kitchen,  bits of corroded old faucet parts all over the counter, and every single cleaning product that usually resides under the sink spread out across the kitchen floor. Not to mention the vacuum cleaner sitting in the middle of the room. (Why? Who uses a vacuum cleaner to fix a faucet?)

Did I manage to cook a wonderful dinner despite conditions? Yes I did, and eventually the resident Mr. Plumber came home and installed a new faucet and even helped clean up the mess. So there's that. However, I'm still awaiting resolution of some other issues involving nonfunctioning stuff--Spring seems to be the season of rampant mechanical collapse. 

Yesterday, for instance, I spent an absurd amount of time on the phone with the friendly customer service people at Amazon trying to track down the replacement Kindle they claimed to have delivered to me last week (because the Kindle I received for Christmas stopped working). You should have heard me explaining patiently to the cheery customer service person that if sending one replacement Kindle to the wrong address was an error, sending a second replacement Kindle to the same wrong address was unlikely to fix the problem.

But I survived all that and arrived on campus this morning ready to take on the pile of drafts requiring immediate response, only to find that the coffee-maker in the department office won't turn on. Why? Because there's no power in that end of the office. Why? Because someone must have tried to use the microwave and the hotpot at the same time and tripped the circuit breaker...and then walked away from the problem. 

I don't want to know who that someone might be because I'm not in any condition to express myself clearly before my morning coffee. At times like these, the best I can do is to throw my hands in the air and call out to the Powers That Be to send a repair person pronto. What will my colleagues do without their morning quota of caffeine? The place will be unbearable. Fix it, please! Will somebody please just fix it?!!