Last September, my landlady told me that she was going to have a new bathroom installed on the third floor, and that this meant that the contractors would have to go through my basement apartment in order to lay pipes for it. She told me that this would happen in October, and offered to put me up in a hotel for a few days while the work was done. I told her that this was all right, and that I could arrange to stay with friends for up to a week if necessary.

The work then got bumped ahead to November, and then again to the last week of December. I took a week off work to visit with family, and arranged to stay the following week with Owin and Irena in Toronto, just in case it took the contractors longer than a week to do the work (likely, as this was taking place over the Christmas holidays.) I left Toronto on 24 December, came back the following week, visited James and Erin in Kitchener the next weekend, and came back on 9 January, to find out that I had no floor.

Owin and Irena were happy to let me stay on longer, and as soon as I was able to contact the people doing the work, they happily assured me that it would just take another week or so and that I could move in the following Tuesday.

A couple of days later I got in touch with my landlady, who’d been told Thursday.

I visited my apartment on Tuesday, and confirmed that it wasn’t yet ready. I told them I’d pop back on Thursday to see.

It wasn’t ready on Thursday. But they assured me that it would definitely be ready on Friday.

By this point I’d been staying with Owin and Irena for three weeks, 3 times as long as expected, and they had other visitors arriving. I packed up my belongings and carried them back to the apartment to meet my landlady at 3:30 on Friday, except she was the only one there, because the contractors had knocked off for the day, and their work wasn’t done yet. I pulled a mattress out of storage and spent an uncomfortable night on the floor, and they arrived at 10:00 Saturday morning and happily assured me that the remaining work would only take about three hours. I offered to get out of their hair and come back at 3:00.

I did, and they weren’t finished, but they assured me that it would definitely only take a couple more hours, and I went out, got a bite to eat, and came back at 5:00, to find that nobody was there, the work wasn’t done yet, and they’d thoughtfully dumped my mattress on the floor again for me.

It’s now 3:10 pm on Sunday, I’m the only one in the apartment, my monitor and modem are on the floor, and I’m balancing my keyboard on my leg, typing this.

If anybody out there is planning to have some work done on their house, don’t.

Update: Literally three seconds after hitting “Publish” on this, I got a spam e-mail offering me a credit loan for home renovations. Where were you people when I— no, never mind.

Other update: And of course now that I’ve logged on, three weeks later, I forgot to add the pending comments to my past entries. Sorry, you two; no offence intended.