One of the nice things about living in a compound is that there are dedicated maintenance guys whose job is to fix whatever goes wrong in your apartment. If I have a problem I don’t need to grab a phone book to look up a plumber, electrician or whomever, I just have to call the main office and have the maintenance guys sent over.
What makes me even more fortunate is that the maintenance guys in my compound are a) competent and b) quick. Usually once or twice a month I hear horror stories from coworkers and other people living in other compounds about problems with maintenance staff. Guys who have to be shown how to do their jobs, or show up one to two weeks despite repeated calls about your washing machine being broken, or both – having guys who don’t know what they are doing show up after one or two weeks. And there is no choice in the matter, if you call someone else then you are paying the bill out of your own pocket, if the security staff even lets the repair guy in.
At my compound you call and they are there within an hour looking at the problem. I’ve only needed them a couple of times but both times everything was fixed promptly and I had no further problems since (which is a good thing since one of the things they had to fix was an air conditioner!). It’s like out of those 1950’s futuristic shows, just push a button and suddenly people show up to fix things!
The maintenance guys will be getting a nice bonus from me this Christmas.
As a side note I’ve been seeing all the media coverage of this university shooting in the States and have come to two conclusions:
1) similar disasters in non-Western countries would get about 1/5th the coverage;
2) the media have provided the shooter with what he wanted, attention and fame. He went from unrecognized nobody to having everything he did and wrote being scrutinized by millions;
Both of these issues indicate something wrong today with media. Now item #1 I don’t blame US media for, the shootings happened in the US so it is natural that they’d give it lots of coverage; but why were BBC and Al-Jazeera providing live feeds and tons of coverage? Repeated bombings taking out dozens in Baghdad get a news story of a few minutes on those networks, a US school shooting gets repeated and lengthy multi-day coverage. I don’t get it.
As for item #2, it wouldn’t surprise me if this trend increases the problem of these kinds of incidents occurring in the future. Now lonely suicidal nutcases know that taking a bunch of innocent people with them before they go will give them the attention they deludedly think they deserve. Just touch on the shooter’s name and move on, don’t dwell on them. I wonder if this nutcase was mentioning Columbine because he liked the attention those killers got?
Anyway, rant over, time for the weekend.
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