My "I Love Lucy" Moment. Or: How I got introduced to all of my neighbors and why they think the American living in their building is a retard

I had an “I Love Lucy” moment today.

You know those moments, don’t you? It starts off innocently enough – there’s some minor technical problem that’s been bothering you and you think you can solve it easily enough without anybody’s help. So you go out and do something about it. Maybe Ricky's been really tightfisted again with the money. Maybe getting a job packaging chocolate at the chocolate factory to earn some pocket money sounds good, but then suddenly, before you know it, you've got a mouth crammed full of chocolate and you're shoving more into your shirt pocket as things start spinning out of control.

I’m lucky enough to live in the city in an apartment with a washing machine. However, this presents its own complications, as I discovered today.

Upon my return from Pavlodar, I realized that the hose connecting the hot water to my washing machine had been slowly leaking. In addition, the handle to open and close the valve connecting the washing machine had broken off some time ago, which isn’t *that* serious, since it’s all in a closed system. However, the leaking was no doubt in relation to the fact that the valve was always open. See exhibit A.

Easy enough to fix, right? Buy a new handle to close the valve, and some plumber’s tape to seal off the leak on the hose. I tramp off to the bazaar.

There, I sift through a mess of valves until I find what seems like what I’m looking for. Apparently you can’t buy the handle buy itself, so you have to buy the whole valve.

“Eto russiski, 400T.” This is Russian-made, the woman selling pipe fittings tells me. “Esli ti hochesh kitaiski, 200T.” If you want the Chinese-made, it’s half the cost.

“Are the Chinese ones bad?” I ask her in Russian.
“It’s probably why the handle on your old one broke. Buy the Russian one.” I pay the woman for the new valve and some plumber’s tape and set off back home.

At home, I happily unscrew the handle off the new valve and install it on the new valve, beaming at my ingenuity. I don’t have a good monkey wrench, so I’m scraping by with a small pair of pliers I found in a tool drawer in the house. I turn the pliers, following the righty-tighty rule until it’s tightened to my satisfaction. All right, time for a test run.

I turn the new handle. It doesn’t move.

Huh, that’s weird. Maybe the hard water finally got the valve inside and it’s mineralized shut. I try again, this time pushing a little harder. Should be easy enough once I get the valve moving.

The valve gives a little bit. I can feel it turning ever so slowly, so I apply some more force to turn the handle all the way to the ‘closed’ setting.

*CRUNCH*

Hot water begins to shoot out of the hole where the valve once was (now firmly in my left hand, still attached to the handle) like a fire hose. Hot water. EVERYWHERE.

My first instinct, of course, while the water is blasting and soaking my whole body (and my shorts, which contain my wallet, sunglasses, passport, and digital camera) is to cover the hole with my hands and shove the valve back into the hole. I'm screaming like a little girl, using every curse word in the book in every language I can think of as I'm pushing at the hole where the water is shooting out through.

This of course, is futile, because it seems that I’ve snapped the valve in half, and a part of the valve is still stuck inside the pipe itself, preventing anything from being screwed back in. In my desperation, I jam my palm onto the hole itself, and this only serves to spray the water upwards towards the ceiling, shorting out the light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

So now I’m standing in the dark, soaked shirt to shorts, with water slowly flooding the floor of my bathroom. The floor begins to feel weirdly soapy as the water gets to the box of detergent on the floor as well. I grab a plastic basin and try to redirect the water flow towards the bathtub, where there’s a drain. This, like the palm, only proceeds to redirect the water over to where my dry clothes are hanging from the last wash, when suddenly it occurs to me that there’s a water shut off valve in the toilet room. (the toilet and bathtub is in separate rooms).

I slam the door shut to prevent the water spraying out into the hallway and run to the next room where the water shut off is. I turn off the valves. My leaky toilet stops leaking as I turn the water off, but the water valve in this room seems to have had little effect on the sickening “Pssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” emanating from the next room as the hot water fails to cease.

Time to call for reinforcements. I run out into the hall, soaked head to toe, and knock on the door of my neighbor, desperately. Sergei, a gangly Russian teen living next door, answers the door in his white briefs.

“Sergei! Is your dad home? The valve to my washing machine from the pipe broke and it’s spraying water everywhere! I need to shut off the water!” Of course, this is in my broken Russian, and so it probably came out more like “Sergei! Your dad home? Water washing machine! Broke! Water! Hot Water! How close water!?”

Sergei’s dad is not home, of course, but Sergei runs to my bathroom and offers to use the plastic basin to try and redirect the water back into the tub while I get help. “Go downstairs to the first floor and find the super, it’s a black door.”

I run downstairs, leaving a trail of water as I get to the first floor, and I pound on the door. A woman answers the door, I look inside, it looks like an office space.

“Yes?” says the woman, her eyes slightly open with surprise, as she looks at the strange foreigner, soaked head to toe, gibbers at her.

“Super, he here? Water! Hot Water! Water, Washing Machine, Water Broken! I need close water!”

“Not here!” she says, as she tries to close the door on me, no doubt thinking I’m an escaped mental patient. I jam my arm in the door to stop her from closing it, and I gasp,

“Where’s the super? Who can help me? Please, help me!”. She seems to respond to this, and tells me to go to the second floor where the super apparently lives.

I run to the second floor, and ring the doorbell.
Of course, no answer.

So I run back down and pound on the black door again, begging the woman to help me.
“I don’t know how to turn off the water,” she says. “The master water valve is in the basement, but it’s locked, and you need Nikolai Ivanovich (the super) to open it because he has the key to open the basement.” I beg her to make some calls for me, to which she agrees.

I run back upstairs to my apartment to check on Sergei. My wet shoes squish with each step. Sergei is stripped to his underwear, fighting the futile fight to stop the floor from flooding. He’s bailing the water from the floor to the tub. I tell him that the super isn’t in. Sergei, without looking at me, screams back,

“There should be an extra key to the basement with the director of Lumix, the clothing store on the first floor of the building!”

I run downstairs, and tell the first woman on the phone (who is now frantically calling all of the neighbors to try and find Nikolai). She says okay, and runs out to Lumix to ask the director. The director comes out, and tries the one key she has, but of course, it doesn’t work.

“You need to find Igor Anatolovich, the director of the sport equipment store.” I run over with the woman to the sport equipment store on the other end of the apartment building, and find Igor, who denies knowing anything about any key, ever.

Keep in mind, this is over a span of 15-20 minutes. Everytime I run upstairs to check on the apartment its starting to look more and more like a sauna. Steam is everywhere. Walking into the apartment is like walking into a bad Halloween haunted house with a fog machine gone wild.

After some more frantic pacing, Nikolai Ivanovich decides to show up, and I rush him to open the basement door so we can shut off the main hot water valve.

“I can’t do it,” he tells me. “The café on the first floor is remodeling, and they blocked off access to the main water line, so I can’t access it from here. What’s wrong with your valve? It’s a Chinese valve, isn’t it? Can’t buy the Chinese ones, gotta go with the Italian ones.”

I’m about to tear my hair out. The origins of the valve is the least of my concerns at the moment. I NEED TO TURN OFF THE WATER.

“Okay, what do we do next?” I say to him through gritted teeth.
“Well, we have to find Igor Yevgeninovich, the owner of the café to unlock the back door.” Nikolai picks up his phone, and starts making calls again.

I run up to check on the apartment. The bathroom is flooded and comign out into the hallway. I run back downstairs to find Igor arriving at the scene, who luckily lives in the apartment building down the street. Nikolai again insists on pointing out and debating with Igor the inferiority of Chinese valves.

Igor slowly waddles towards the café back door, unlocking it and walking in while listening to Nikolai's wild proclamation on the superiority of italian valves. He goes down into another basement accessible only through the café with another worker, examining pipes here and there along the way, trying to figure out which pipe shuts off the pipe in my house. After about 5 minutes of poking and touching, he twists a valve and looks at me.

“Well, go see if it’s off.”

I run back upstairs, and I can still hear the sickening

“pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhh”

from outside the door. I look inside, Sergei’s given up, stripped down to his underwear and just pulling on the door to keep it shut. The water isn’t off. I run back downstairs and report.

Igor and Nikolai both scratch their heads a bit, and think “maybe it’s in the other one basement? But we don’t have the key for that…we'll have to call the super of that section...”

"Maybe turn off all pipes? Try all!" I gibber more, having more or less accepted that I effectively have a pool in my house now.

On a whim, Igor pulls out a gigantic wrench and turns off another valve and tells me to check again. I run back upstairs. My assumption that it was just a pool was wrong. My house is actually a sauna. It's difficult to see anything in the house because of the amount of steam, but as I walk in, splashing water everywhere, I'm relieved to see that the water has ceased.

I go back down to report, and my neighbors call KCK for me, the city plumber service who arrive about 30 minutes later to repair the damaged valve.
"What happened?" they ask.
"Valve, broke off, water everywhere." I reply.
"Ahh... yeah, those chinese valves are worthless, can't trust those. Gotta go with It-"
"Italian or Russian, I know, i know" I interrupt. I listlessly hand them the new Russian valve that I had bought earlier and they fix everything for me.

After about an hour of cleaning and mopping up the new olympic sized swimming pool in my bathroom and corridor, while the plumbers are working, everything is finally repaired and the water is back on. I pay the plumbers and casually look over at the job and find that they had left old broken valve on my washing machine, the original source of all my problems.

*SIGH*