The Tiniest Bit of Excitement on a Potentially Boring Day

Last night around ten I was chilling on my computer as my roommate went to bed (yeah, she goes to bed early, my roommates here are just way too mature). As I was listening to music on my computer I could hear a light tapping noise coming from our bedroom wall. I thought someone was tapping on the wall. As I took out my headphones I could hear that there were actually two tapping noises. And one sounded a lot like water was dripping.

I ignored it at first. I'm really good at tuning noises out when I don't want to hear them (pretty bad during class when the professor is discussing something important though). I got into PJs and did all my nightly routine stuff. As I went back into our room just about to climb up into my bunkbed, I heard the tapping noise again. It had been going on the whole time, but it just entered into my head again.

I was really curious what the noise was. I heard water. I knew our old apartment used to sound like water was running through the walls all the time. So I wasn't really worried about there being a problem, I was more just curious where this noise was coming from. First I asked my roommate. She said she heard the noise too and it had been going on for a while, but didn't know where it was coming from.

Finally I went into the hall. Just on the other side of our closet wall is our utilities closet. I opened the door and immediately knew where the water was coming from. The floor was covered in water, and more water was dripping from like five different places. I didn't even know where it was beginning. It was like every pipe in the whole closet was leaking.

I called my roommate and told her I was pretty sure it was raining inside our apartment. We both looked at it for a second, trying to figure out what to do. I mentioned getting a bowl, but as she pointed out, what good would that do? There was so much water on the floor already and it was dripping from so many places we'd need a lot of bowls.

We pulled the vacuum, mop, and other stuff out and then decided to go to our neighbors upstairs to see what was going on. We knocked on their door and explained what happened in our apartment and went to their utilities closet to figure it out. And of course you could hear the problem walking down the hall. As we opened the door we saw the cause. It was as if someone had turned a faucet on full blast from one of their pipes. Hard to explain, but it was a LOT of water.

We went to get the managers. It was about 10:30 at this point. The manger came and spent about three minutes in there fixing it, draining off water into a jug and doing other random stuff. I think they said it was the hot water heater... and something about freezing from the cold. I don't really know. The manager didn't really know either. But apparently the same thing had happened in another apartment. He said he'd have our maintenance guy come over first thing in the morning.

We went back downstairs.

Fortunately, our utilities closet has a drain in the floor so the water didn't spread much further.

Unfortunately, my side of the closet is the one that shares a wall with the utilities closet and so there was water all over the floor of my closet.

Fortunately, it was only my already dirty clothes that got wet.

We made sure the water had stopped leaking, *texted our other roommates, and then went to bed wide awake. Pretty fun final twenty minutes of the night.

*I think it's totally hilarious that my computer doesn't know the word "texting" or "texted" and is telling me I'm spelling it wrong. Just thought I'd throw that in there. :)