Lori and I both left the condo late in the morning. For her, a nail appointment, and for me, a much-needed massage.
I arrived back at the condo feeling very relaxed and heard a strange whooshing noise in the hall. As I approached our door, I stepped in about a half inch of water. All the therapeutic benefits of my massage immediately went out the window as pure disbelief and adrenaline surged through me.
I opened our condo door to see a fountain of water spouting from the faucet at the kitchen sink. Apparently the handle had blown off due to the water pressure and was spurting a heavy stream of water into the air and about 6 feet across the room.
I ran downstairs to find the maintenance guy and he looked a little perturbed since I was disturbing his lunch. Through my limited Thai I told him that water had flooded not only our room but the entire 3rd floor. He grabbed his tool bag very nonchalantly thinking that whatever this farang (Thai word for foreigner) was saying couldn't be all that bad. Once he got to our floor, he realized that my explanation was spot on and he jumped into action, wiping up water with one hand and shouting into his cellphone for reinforcements with the other.
We used every towel we had in the condo, but we were battling about a 1/2 inch of water that had now spread to a huge area of the 3rd floor. He called the condo cleaning lady who came up to help. She used our dust pan to literally shovel water from the hallway into a bucket. I just kept wringing out towels and trying to soak up as much water as possible. Emptying bucket after bucket, we wondered if we'd ever see dry floors again.
Soon the building manager showed up with fresh towels and started helping out. I looked around and wondered how long the water had run and how much of it was now in the other condos on our floor. I asked the manager to look into the other rooms in our hallway, which he did, and thankfully the water hadn't seeped very far into the other residents' rooms.
We eventually cleaned up the entire flooded mess in just under two hours. We thanked everyone for helping us and they apologized for the faucet breaking. Hopefully we won't have any more mishaps, but if and when we do, I hope we can just remember to "roll with it." Now, please excuse me because I am off to get another much-needed massage.