Still Cold, after all these years

It's still really cold inside. ¶I got home from the gym last night and found this gem of a letter taped inside our elevator. I read it through and audibly cheered, it felt like Christmas. I haven't met the author yet, but he's far more eloquent than moi. He also raises some important points, like how there's an incessant clanging noise emanating from the basement up through all of the freezing pipes and it bangs/BANGS/BANGS all through the night. I wish that I could bake him cupcakes just for the way he used the word emanating to describe something in our building. And the fact that he too has discovered our friendly open-back-door policy. ¶Seeing as the tenants of our building have no faith in public recourse, we are limited to scotch-taping letters in the hallway. Some of them (like Susanna the Stripper) use lip-liner to get their point across. Others (like Attorney) use fancy legal-speak. Both are equally effective in getting us all riled up and making our building appear even more ghetto to outsiders. I just turn to my little blogspot blog and pray that someone out there reads the thing. ¶After reading Attorney's fantastic letter, I marched over to the office to fill them in on the fact that we have no heat. They were in the middle of the LEASING PARTY in which they are luring unassuming professionals to move into our building. Bright-eyed consumers mincing about and looking at pretty graphics of apartment layouts and furniture design and being fed machine-processed soft bake cookies and drinking up all that PR copy: realizing your potential; urban lifestyle trendster, it's all about you, blah blah. ¶The minute the management saw me enter, they performed a total body block not unlike the Chicago Bear defensive line. They knew that there was absolutely nothing that I could say or do that would convince all these hipsters to sign up for inflated leases. All I said, was hey, you know that I haven't had heat for the last four days? And they were all exasperated with the old news, as if I'd just announced that Hilary Clinton might run for president. ¶"Yeah, yeah we know (GET OUTTA HERE). The whole back tier of the building doesn't have heat (I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON"T KNOW). It's this thing in the pipe. We're going to order a part, maybe on Monday-it'll be fixed by next week" (MAKE ME). Ah, that word again. Parts. Man, they're always out of parts and it takes them ages to get 'em, like my light that took 5 weeks to repair because of a part. ¶When I got back to the lobby, there was an impromptu gathering of tenants congregating around Attorney's letter and voicing complaints. Susanna was saying, yeah I'm too cold to stick around. I just bought a plane ticket to get out of here. And this other guy told me he's moving out next week. The other Susanna said that the management had told her it would be fixed in a week. ¶Another week without heat in February? This is starting to feel just a little bit like Sarajevo. After we stood around and had a huge bitch session, the old, old man followed me up in the elevator and told me that for the 25 years he's lived here, the heat has never ever gone out. And he should know. He explained the whole heating system and how the clanging is the boiler trying to shoot hot water up the pipes but it just falls back down again, over and over. Dear me.