This afternoon, I received a registered letter telling me that a resident in my park in northern New York thinks that my manager is blowing off his job. That is usually untrue, but a registered letter is a marker that the sender is trying to lay a paper trail. A paper trail means the threat of a law suit and I am a big, stationary target, so it gets my attention. The letter said that the water in the resident’s home was discolored and that the manger, Mike, had ignored complaints by saying that, since the park had town water, any problems with the water quality should be addressed to the town. The resident had contacted the town about the issue, and the town had said that it was not their problem. Included in the letter was a printed-out picture of a mason jar filled with a liquid that looked like diner coffee. I scanned it and emailed it to Mike. In the email, I said, ‘Please test the water at the riser to the home, at the curb and at the faucet. If water is dirty at the curb, it is a town issue. If it is dirty at the riser, it is a park issue. If it is dirty at the faucet, it is this guy’s issue.’
When I sent the email, Mike was pouring a pad. Unlike the guy at my park in central New York, he has done this before, so when he sent me pictures of the finished product, it was square, level and smooth, and the R-board was not stuck into the ground corner-side first. He called while I was on hold with Rent Manager, trying to move a resident from one unit to another. When I managed to reach him, he had already finished the job and sent me a picture. I said, ‘The pad looks great.’
‘Did you want the surface striped, or grooved?’
‘Swirled like oatmeal, please.’
He told me about the water complaint. Six months ago, he had, for his own personal account, sold a home in the park that he had bought and rehabbed to a new guy. A few months after that, the guy had said that the water coming out of one of his faucets was clean but water coming out of his tub was dirty. I said, ‘That sounds like a him problem, not a park problem’.
‘You know, he lives next to Ms. O’Reilly.’
Ms. O’Reilly is a woman with a tattoo on the place where her left pec tendon attaches to her humerus bone. She is easy-going when she is sober, but she is a nasty, demanding drunk – and she is often drunk. I said,
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, she would have had a thing or two to say about it, if the water in the main was brown.’
‘So – he thinks that the water comes out of the riser light brown and then there is a Y where it is sorted out –‘
‘Uh-huh.’
‘-and the dark molecules go to one faucet and the clean molecules go to the other faucet?’
‘Even my mother knows that’s not possible!’
‘Anyone who has poured water into a bowl can see that that is impossible.’
I reflected that I tend to focus on Ms. O’Reilly’s tattoo when I see her because it is on a body part that I injured badly twelve years ago. Shortly after I started work at a new job, I fell when I was running for the train and ripped my pec tendon off my humerus. The surgeon was able to re-attach it, but I was in a sling for six weeks and physical therapy for half a year. I recently had rotator-cuff surgery on the same shoulder and it is still not a hundred percent better. I guess that’s why I look at the place where Ms. O’Reilly’s pec tendon meets her breast instead of her face when I speak with her.
I reflected further – put a bunch of park owners in a room and they will start talking about plumbing and crazy residents. Put a bunch of old guys in a room and they will start talking about shoulder and back ailments.
I said to Mike, ‘Test the water at the riser. If it is clean, the conversation is over as far as the park is concerned. If he wants you to do plumbing on his home, that’s between you and him.’
A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid whose viscosity varies depending on the stress applied to it. In physics-speak, a non-Newtonian fluid does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity. For example, oobleck is a thick mixture of corn starch and water. When it is not under pressure, it behaves like a liquid. When it is under pressure, it behaves like a solid. If you are the parent of a four-year-old, give him or her a bowl of oobleck to play with. You will have thirty minutes of peace and quiet to catch up on age-appropriate activities for yourself, like sleeping, reading the newspaper, or watching midget porn.
The field of quantum mechanics was developed during the first half of the twentieth century to explain certain nano-level phenomena that could not be explained by Newtonian physics. Some such things shouldn’t happen, but do. For example, light can appear to be either a wave or a bunch of discrete particles, depending on how it is observed. A particle can tunnel through a barrier even if the particle’s kinetic energy is smaller than the maximum of the potential. The way quantum mechanics get comfortable with these phenomena is by describing them using probabilities. For example, it is impossible to have a precise prediction of both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle. You can calculate probability values for both, but the greater the probability of one of these features, the less certainty you can have regarding the probability of the other.
I have said that manufactured housing communities are like black holes. They suck everything around them in. Once matter enters, it never leaves and it obeys laws different from those on the outside. That said, park regs are written in Newtonian terms. That guy owns that home. Mike sold it to him as-is. If the water at the riser is clean, he will have to fix his plumbing himself.
Maybe I missed something, but what was the answer to the water discoloration problem?
It was clear at the riser.