There's a joke by a comedian, "You know who cares less about your problems than you do?"
"Everybody."
And I get that. But I think I want to use this space I'm occupying on the internet to get personal because what I experience is just a variation of what we all experience, each of us in our own bubble that we lived in before COVID-19, but which is exaggerated now.
And I've got the skill set necessary to write about my experiences.
So here goes this entry.
We have a plumbing problem that will require several thousand dollars to fix. The problem is not our fault but it's still our problem. It should be a shared problem with our neighbour, but our neighbour is not as affected by it as we are, and so he says he doesn't have a problem and so is not going to share the cost of solving it. He will benefit from the fix, but he doesn't care. We would absolutely share the cost of the fix if the situation was reversed, and I have paid him for cosmetic changes he wanted to make to our properties that I didn't care about at all and which caused us inconvenience, but so it goes.
It was a one-sided relationship effort on the social front as well, me trying to be the exception for a man who lacks respect for other people, but he has helped us with this and that over the years, too, and like I say now, so it goes.
Meanwhile, the city of Ottawa initially assured both us and the plumber - who spoke directly to the fellow at the city - that the city of Ottawa was responsible for the problem being caused and so video was made by the plumber that we would then be tasked with sending to the city - electronically - so that "next steps", as is said in government, could be taken.
And here's where 'it's all just too much' comes in. Never mind that we paid a few hundred dollars last November to deal with this problem, a problem that popped up in our basement after the city dug up the street in front of our unit, which it did on behalf of the millionaire apartment building owner across the street when he decided to convert his 2 and 3 bedroom family apartments into bachelors and 1 bedrooms and charge $1100 and $1500 respectively for them.
Never mind either that we had to deal with it again when the city came back for a re-do. And yes, I reported this amazing coincidence at the time but was told, "Oh well sometimes this sort of activity by the city" (she left out "on behalf of millionaire apartment building owners") "can expose existing problems" (she left out "for taxpaying suckers we don't care about as much as we care about millionaire apartment building owners").
Never mind either that after doing the work of getting the video to the city electronically - a task that I can assure you very few people would actually be able to do - like maybe one in ten thousand - we were told that the city wasn't responsible after all.
Never mind that making the video for the city cost a few hundred dollars, thereby ratcheting up the amount (a few hundred dollars times three) we paid for a temporary fix to a problem that the city assured us was its responsibility, and that the city then used that video to claim the opposite of what it had claimed when we were told to make it.
Never mind all that.
There is absolutely no way that most taxpayers would have the technical expertise to do what we were tasked with doing. It is simply too difficult and we should not tolerate this bullying by technology that our various and sundry public service bureaucracies are engaging in. And so on the advice of a friend, we will engage the services of our city councilor to find out - definitively - who is responsible for the problem, and therefore the temporary fixes required until we are able to deal with the permanent fix, which we accept as our responsibility, our civic duty, really, regardless of our neighbour's failure to rise to the occasion as I warrant most neighbours would.
So ending on a positive note, I have learned a valuable lesson. I have known all along that this would be how our neighbour would react to a situation like this. He cares about his lawn more than he cares about anybody or anything in the world. And he's an independent operator. Nobody knows more than he does. It's why his own dearly beloved brother moved from the unit we now live in. He got tired of it.
When a person shows me who they are, believe them. Stop trying to make other people be better and just be better myself. And ask myself, in a situation like this: What do I want?
Well, I want a permanent fix to the problem. If I have to pay solo for it, okey dokey. Unseen infrastructure can be like a hot potato - every once in a while we all get burned. And I never expected that the city would pay to replace it, either. That's not what this is about. This is about the city of Ottawa - which, as it turns out, will be showing up next week to take its own video ANYWAY - tasking us with an assignment I can assure you most people would not be able to do. And this is about now having to take up the time of our city councilor to find out which story is true, that the city is responsible for the temporary but still expensive, not to mention dangerous to our health, problem, a permanent fix for which is our responsibility ANYWAY - or is it not responsible.
But it's mostly about being a voice for anybody and everybody who has had it up to here with technobureaucratic public services that only add to the increasing isolation we were already feeling but which has only increased as a result of COVID-19.
