FLOODING PART THREE

You will have to excuse me, dear reader, but I think I have just about lost track of time and days after what has happened here in the condo where my wife and I live. I am trying very hard to let you know what is going on with our condo problems. You will get all the facts but don't worry so much whether my time that I am giving you is exactly right or off a little bit.

I have to tell you that it was last Wednesday, early in the morning, when I first started writing this article. Or at least I thought it was!  So many things had been going on over the past few days before that frankly I might be telling you something that happened on the wrong time frame. But don't worry too much, because it all fits in together so that you will know what happened.

Just so that you will remember, here are the 2 big areas that we had to deal with:

"However, as usual, we got a late phone call that woke us up. This time it was from a gentleman from a company that we had never heard of that told us that he wanted to come to our house on Monday at 9 AM to look at what had to be done because he'd been appointed by the Insurer to do the work. Of course, that was a surprise to me because another company was supposed to come and see us as the Insurance Company representative..."

Here is the second one:

"Someone is supposed to come from the Reliance firm sometime this afternoon to figure out what is going wrong. Of course, that has ruined what my wife and I intended to do on Sunday but what the heck, we can now rest at home."

Let me deal with the Reliance matter first.  One of their employees from out of town who was working in the area because of the disastrous weather had come and fixed up our natural gas hot water heater. Or so we thought.

The water heater was making a horrific sound and, given the fact that it had been around for 10 years, I was concerned that it might need replacement because it had broken down. Alternatively, I was also worried that the problems after the heavy rain might have created some difficulties that required fixing up.  The gentleman came and eliminated the noise completely. I was so happy but unfortunately my happiness only lasted for about 10 hours. At about 3 o'clock in the morning on Monday morning, I was awoken by the same horrible sound coming from the water heater in the basement that I heard before. I contacted Reliance again at around that time but believe it or not their phone system was completely busy. I could not get through to an operator at all. Can you imagine how bad the situation was with Reliance equipment as a result of the flooding.

It all took about an hour and, to be quite direct about it all, I was furious about what happened. I could not believe that it seemed that the same problem was still around and even the repair man who had been to our house before was concerned that there was a much bigger problem but hoped that he had solved it.  Unfortunately he had not.

Again, without going through all of the misery and the extent of the coverage that I had with Reliance in our phone call, they agreed that someone would come and visit our premises on Monday. I was pleased about that until no one came on Monday at all! That is correct. That story I was given when I called Reliance to find out why no one had been to my condo yet was that all of the afternoon appointments, which mine was, were cancelled because of the amount of work that had begun in the morning and still had to be completed. Can you believe that because I could not. I was not warned about that at all although the Reliance employee I talked to believed that all of the customers involved had been contacted.  Without going through our not so pleasant "conversation," it was agreed that a service person would come between 7 AM and 11 AM the next day to try to figure out what was going on.

Naturally, no one came to our residence between 7 AM and 8 AM in the morning so I called Reliance again. I must admit that I never really expected someone to come in 7 AM because of past experiences about when the employees actually started working but I wanted to know what time the repair person was coming. Regretfully, the operator could not tell me at all when that person was coming! I was furious. I called immediately after our telephone call ended one of the senior officers that I knew in our region because of the mess that our family has had with Reliance over about the last year and a half concerning our new gas system that we installed. I think that he was rather shocked about what happened and told me that he would contact one of the repair people and have him come over immediately.

Believe it or not, that happened. One of his senior employees was fixing up another home first and then was told to come to our house immediately thereafter. He did so. The gentleman who came was extremely experienced. He looked over our system and did what he thought would work. Brilliantly, it did!  He told us in addition that if there still were problems in the future not necessarily to get a new system but to try and have the old one repaired. As far as he was concerned, the older systems might even be better than the new ones.

Accordingly, so far, everything is working with the natural gas water heater. Fingers crossed that everything will be fine.  Our technician was absolutely superb in what he was doing and what he explained to me when finished.

Now let me tell you what was going on at exactly the same time as this repair job.  But I will tell you about this in another article.