I love living in Vietnam.  And I love living in my apartment.  I really do.  These things should be a surprise to no one.

However, I do have problem with my apartment.  And sadly, when it used to infuriate me, and the annoy me, now, just makes me shrug.

I lean into the problem, think about my life after resolution, and fix it.

There’s something powerful in that, I think.

I came home last night at around 7pm or thereabout, and before I had made it to the doorstep, found a huge puddle of water in front of my apartment.  In fact, it had spread halfway down the hall, and it was quite clearly coming from my apartment.  It had happened again.

You see.  I live on the third floor of an old building in the heart of Saigon.  Charitable people would say that it was colonial, rustic or even a heritage structure.  It is OLD, but with that comes a lot of personality and a fantastic location.  Most of the apartments have been renovated, though most of the renovations are superficial.

The renovations are skin deep, covering internal organs that are rotting through with structural tumors.

A good example of this is my electrical system.  Or my air conditioner which would blow out my electrical system.  Hourly.  Or the four foot tall roof on my balcony, just high enough for you to sit out there, but not high enough to actually enjoy it.

But my plumbing system is the greatest cancer of them all.

The Vietnamese water system is many things, but none of them are strong enough to get water up to the second floor of my apartment.  And lo, my landlord has installed a Shimizu water pump to make showering possible, and even pleasant.  It looks like a black dinosaur egg, and when it runs, it sounds like a baby velociraptor.  Its hunger for water and electricity is boundless.

And it tends to explode.

It explodes at the most unreasonable of times.  It has happened so far four times.  I have come home late at night from the airport to a flooded apartment.  I have been asleep in my living room, and awoken by angry neighbors at the door (complete with pitch forks and torches).  The whole building was flooding due to my pump.  It makes a mean Frankenstein’s monster.

Normally when I put on my Noah costume and prepare for 40 days and 40 nights on a boat, I call my landlord, rant and cry, and call my cleaning lady and tell her what happened.  I love her for just volunteering to come in and help me mop up the house, and listen to me rail against the universe, destiny, and the Ho Chi Minh City water company.

This is my standard operating procedure.

But instead, last night, I came home and saw that my neighbors hadn’t noticed yet.  So I just grabbed a mop and started mopping the public areas first.

I don’t mind hard work, but I am intensely embarrassed when my mistakes make life difficult for others.

After a while, the old man next door saw me mopping away in my dress clothes, and started helping me with his broom.  His son later chipped in, and an hour later, we had reduced the water level from “water ski” to “slippery when wet.”  We have young children in our hallway, so it is important to make it somewhat safe.  At this point, it was past 8pm, and the children were hopefully in safe in bed.

And then I turned inward to my apartment, and started mopping up inside.  It took me another two hours and I had inadvertently missed an important business call.  Had a glass of wine, wrote a blog post (Mimo) and went to sleep.

Now ordinarily, what I should have done was call up the landlord, complain loudly and make her feel as guilty as possible.  I should have also ruined my cleaning lady’s night and gotten her to come in.  And I would have locked myself in my room and waited for the waters to recede.  This is the expat way.

Yet, I took care of it myself.  This morning, I called the landlord, explained to her what happened, and that I felt like it was my fault.  And asked her to replace to pump, as obviously copious repairs have failed.

For once, I have demonstrated that I am working with an imperfect situation.  Instead of shifting the problem and resolution to other people, I have stood up and become accountable for their problemas.

And for that, she has gone to purchase a new pump.

My staff tell me that my Vietnamese birth sign is “mountain spring.”  I am a water sign, but appear in places where water is scarce.  I never imagine that my apartment had the same sign.