The upstairs shower.

I moved into this new place roughly two months ago. So far everything has been great. The rent is cheap, my room is massive, and everyone generally keeps to themselves.

The one beef I have with this place has to do with the shower, located upstairs. It's the only source of comfort when you start smelling and your armpits begin to itch. A good shower can stop wars. It can mend broken marriages, and above all, it helps keep my sanity intact. The shower in this house does a pretty good job of doing just that, except when it doesn't. And here is where my rant begins.

Every so often, while I'm cleaning myself, the hot water will go cold. Suddenly, inexplicably, and without warning. It's like premature ejaculation. Pleasure cut short. Potong stim. Very fucking annoying. I started to time my showers, making a mental note as to when the water chills. Being as bad a timekeeper as I was, I figured it was about 10 minutes or so every time I turn on the hot water. I figured it was some kind of temporal hot water cache that would run out, and needed to be replenished, which it did after a while.

My showers would generally go like this: Turn on hot water, enjoy it for a while, wait til it goes cold, then start using the shampoo and soap. Wait for the water to heat up again, by which the shampoo and soap would be nicely applied on my person, and use the second dose of warm bliss to wash it off.

So it was for a week or so. It made taking showers very, very annoying. Then I started to hear about my flat-mate's experiences with the upstairs shower. She has of course, been bitten by the suddenly cold suddenly hot problem before. But the curious thing was that she seemed to have rare occurrences in which the hot water would not act up. She said it often happened at night, about 9 or 10 o clock.

So I took her suggestion, and took one of my showers during this supposedly magic hour. But it seemed what worked for her would not work for me. Annoyed and confused, I felt like I had only one option left. That was to ask my rather uptight landlord about this.

What he revealed to me was rather telling, and surprising. The gist of it is this.

The hot water problem would only happen if while you were bathing, someone were to use water downstairs.

Still skeptical, I tried taking my showers in the middle of the night, when I was sure everyone was sound asleep.

It was glorious.

The first proper shower I had in weeks! I felt like I had made a major discovery. One for the ages. Or at least, for the rest of my time here. But the I got to thinking.

So my previous hot showers had been disrupted by someone willingly? If it was the landlord downstairs I could understand, since it would be rather pissy of me to ask him to check the shower every time he needed to pee. But what if it was someone living upstairs? The layout of the rooms upstairs is so that you would always know if someone was in the shower or not if you stepped out. This means that if someone upstairs was responsible, it would make them complete jerks.

Sigh.

Now I only take my showers in the middle of the night, which is apparently bad for you. Or something. I get nervous if I take a shower in the day. Having hot water cut off during a shower is about the worst thing that could happen to you during a shower, short of the scene from Psycho I suppose. I try to make sure I'm not disrupting anyone's shower every time I step out to wash my hands by checking upstairs. Not too troublesome for me, but I would never presume such a thing for others. What's left? Well not much, except to endure the fact that I can now only take showers in the middle of the night. Which, now that I think about it, isn't too bad a deal. It gave me renewed appreciation for that marvel that is hot water from the tap, but also made me a little bit more cynical about humanity's future. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But whatever. I'm out.