Maintenance Request

By Jessica Greathouse

In everyone’s life, something breaks. It is the inevitable. Maybe it will be your dishwasher, perhaps doom will befall your microwave instead. If you are anything like me, you have no idea how to fix these things. Any attempt made in an effort to do so only results disaster and irreparable damage to your machinery. No, this is why you lived in an apartment, aside from the fact that your bank account could never support you living in a house. You can just call the apartment complex and they will send the maintenance man to fix it all. This is easy, right?

Wrong.

You wait for days, sitting idly by your broken oven, wishing beyond a belief that it would work. At first, you are hopeful. They will come. They will look at the oven. And then, they will do what they are trained to do, and they will fix it. And then come the days of baking store-bought lasagna.

The first few days are hopeful. You look for the signs that they’ve been there. Notes about how the oven might get fixed perhaps? There are no signs. Time passes, it feels like decade. The oven has become that broken thing that once brought joy. And most importantly, food. The food is gone. The world seems barren. When you are hardly clinging to the hope, they come, the maintenance people. They look at the oven and say it is an easy fix. They will be back that day with the part. Not to worry, this is a minor problem. The oven, once a source of woe, is a beaming light. You try to reserve yourself, but again, you are hopeful.

They never come back. You curse the stars. Why did you choose to live here? Of course it is so cheap. Dragging your feet, you make another maintenance request. They take the same amount of time to arrive, but this time you expected it. You are not the child you once were, you’ve learned. You wait, and tell the maintenance man, who is a completely different person than before, of your troubles in fixing the oven. They never came back with the part. He looks at it and reassures you that he will fix it. He needs to order the part, but he, unlike the man before him, is trustworthy and in a week, the oven will work. The hope floods back into you, you naïve child. FOOOODDDD your body screams. Your brain yells at you that this is illogical, but you are giddy.

Weeks pass….

More complaints are filed. You lose track of them. You curse the apartment complex you live at. They all do the same. Come in, reassure you, and never come back with the parts. Then, when the long year is coming to an end and your lease is coming to an end, they come. It seems every one of them that has scorned you and lied comes in, wheeling a new oven. Tears roll down your face. The oven is months late, you have days to use it, yet still it makes you happy. And as soon as your joy comes, it goes as your roommate walks into the room holding acup of cold coffee and says

“The microwave is broken.”

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