Humor

Dear Maintenance Guy

Dear Maintenance Guy,

There’s a good chance that I might not finish this letter. You see, the bathroom’s sprung a leak and the water is rising; but alas, I’m sitting here without an ark.

Sure, I went ahead and gathered the animals two by two like you instructed – but they’re the unpleasants – the mice that you failed to exterminate, a lousy neighbor cat from the wall you didn’t secure and a few measly pigeons out for some trash scraps… A most sorry ark indeed.

But hey, what do you care? You’re the maintenance guy, you’ve got the world to fix.

About a week ago I put a request to have my bathroom leak fixed, shame on me for being so ho-hum without a sense of urgency trusting that you would get the job done.

The leak started off as a drip but with all matters involving consistency, it grew into a rising flood.

As the wood floors started to swell, and my ankles become dirty-water-wet, I knew that my hopes for a speedy recuse was a hopeful fantasy.

I can only imagine what you are doing instead of fixing my bathroom oh maintenance guy.

Perhaps you’re enjoying your cigarette break. Hell, stay for another; allegedly it will calm the nerves.

Perhaps you’re dealing with some shit from an uncooperative toilet. A gurgling conversation indeed.

One can only imagine that you’ve been putting up with other’s people’s shit for quite some time. – You know, with your line of work and all.

Perhaps you’re getting it from the brass who’s piling on the work, unaware of the of the lengthy time it takes to screw in a lightbulb or even install some basic curtain blinds.

They push, they push and they push some more… unsympathetic to the stresses of the maintenance guy.

Those pig-headed bastards live so easy, cool in their igloo of air conditioning.

The water’s up to my chest now; the cat and the mice have escaped through a small opening – a testament to your patchwork.

It’s just me, the pigeon and the damn leaky toilet – where’s the magic plunger when you need it?

Now that the water is about to hug my neck, I need to know. Why did you wait to complete my work order?

I trusted you, oh maintenance guy and you threw away my trust for an extra glazed doughnut at the morning meeting.

Bastard!

I won’t have time to escape, and paper is getting wet.

But hey, what do you care? You’re the maintenance guy, you’ve got the world to fix.

Please like, comment share and tell me what you think. Do you have any maintenance guy stories?

55 thoughts on “Dear Maintenance Guy”

  3. Oh, the Arc analogy is spot on! No maintenance guy woes for me yet, but I bet I’ll see a lot of those once I live on my own. At the moment, it’s only about cleaning my room enough for the guy to get in there (in the event that he does arrive, of course!)

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  4. I once stayed in a “garden level” (a/k/a basement…but garden sounds so much nicer doesn’t it?) AirBnB flat in London. In the middle of the night, the water main in the street burst and I woke up at 2 AM ankle deep in water. By time I fled at 5:45 AM the water was about to eclipse the electrical outlets and the welcome mat was floating up the stairs. It felt like the right time to go. Fun times. But at least I can check “wander the streets of Marylebone dragging along a wheelie suitcase before sunrise” off my bucket list.

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    1. Hahah wow 😮- that’s sounds like a scene straight out of a movie. And yes “Garden Level” was a nice word for basement. I hope you got your money back

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  6. At an old place of employment, several of my coworkers complained that housekeeping kept leaving empty boxes that were *clearly* trash instead of throwing them away. I was informed that they even wrote “basura” on the boxes, yet they were still left behind. That was the day that I had to explain that the housekeepers were Chinese. This has nothing to do with maintenance men…but here we are.

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  9. This reminds me of the maintenance guy at the Target where I worked. He worked weekdays only and had no backup/on-call replacement. So as the janitor there were many times when management told me to just shut down the bathrooms for an entire day.

    And then I got to watch people sneak, to attempt to use our very flooded facilities. 😛

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  12. Oh yeah! I once worked for a large furniture company, drying the lumber. We had 16 dry kilns that he’d between 40,000 and 60,000 board feet of lumber. Between the fans, the steam system and the tracks into and out of the lions we had a lot of maintenance issues.
    We were turning in about 40-50 requests once a month. About 5 or six were getting done…. Losing ground constantly… Just the critical ones were getting done…

    Finally I got sick of it picked up fresh box of request forms and went through and made out one request per problem…totaled 275 requests. My supervisor went nuts! You can’t turn all those in at once! I did anyways… The head maintenance engineer loved it! Any time he had a crew with nothing to do he had a solution right in his in box.
    Needless to say the maintenance crews weren’t happy.. Turns out they had been taking the old requests with 40+ problems in them doing one or two and trashing the rest… Things got better after that.

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  13. Hi Tony, thanks for liking my blog on the Heliphone. I have been blogging for a while but don’t have the traction you have. Maybe I’m not proactive enough! I like to read (and write) funny stories, so I am in good company!

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    1. No problem – thanks for stopping by! I like your website it’s nice and congrats and churning out the books – the easiest way to build traction is to simply interact with other writers and readers – they’ll want to see the person who checked them out – hope that helps

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  19. This is great satirical writing! I aspire to write humor. If you have any writers you like to read, I’d love to hear about them. Cheers.

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    1. Thank you so much! Yeah – writing satire is all about having a rant and finding a way to turn it into a story.

      I really enjoy reading Mark Manson, Paulo Coelho and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

      As far as satire writing goes, Maddox was my gateway writer.

      Thanks so much again for checking me out – it’s cool the amount of times you’ve been published.

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  22. My maintenance guy refused to fix my air conditioner. It caught on fire! He also refused to fix the gigantic hole in the ceiling above the air conditioner, so the flames shot right through to the attic. Luckily, my cat realized something was wrong and rescued me from the fire.

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  23. Pingback: Blog roll from tonysbologna – Clean Public Bathrooms

  25. Shhh! Don’t tell anybody, but I used to be a maintenance guy. Most of the problems I had to deal with . . . now keep this a secret . . . were because . . . NOBODY THOUGHT TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT! I’d get an immediate request from someone like you, Lord bless you, but I’d be in the middle of trying to shore up the bulkheads on the TITANIC! This is just between you and me. I’m not a Maint Man anymore. Too much stress.

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    1. Nothing like honest sincere frustration and agony to drive a fun blog post. Thumbs up. [Gaaaah! I left out the word ‘like’ in the previous comment! You could only wish your maintenance guy was that obsessive…;->]

      Reply

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