Fixin' a Hole Where the Rain Gets In...

One of the joys of living here -- or, at least, in my particular apartment -- is dealing with the various everyday problems that materialize over the course of living in the same place for an extended period of time.  The lights burn out, the AC doesn't work, the heat isn't hot enough, the hot water can't handle two showers at the same time, the gas alarms rings at 3am -- these are the run-of-the-mill problems faced by apartment-dwellers everywhere, enjoyed by no one, but basically to be expected by all.  These annoying but commonplace hurdles are made significantly more difficult to jump over here, however, because of a few basic facts:

• The language.  This one's obvious, and it's just part of living abroad.  My Chinese is passable, even "good" for a foreigner, but it's still difficult to convey to a maintenance guy that the circuit breaker keeps tripping every time I use the heating at a certain temperature in the living room.  Hand motions are key, which of course means it's even trickier to describe problems over the phone.
• The skill and training of the maintenance dudes.  There's a guy in my apartment right now, fixing light bulbs.  It's difficult to tell if he knows which way is up.  Eventually, one would hope, we will have functioning lights (the current blackout count stands at 8 bulbs), but you never know.
• Mr. Zhang, the primary maintenance dude (though not the one that's here right now) is far more interested in "hanging out" with us foreigners than he is with, you know, fixing shit.  He often looks from me to my roommates, excitedly, and asks us "你们今天晚上去酒吧喝酒吗?" ("Are you guys going out to the bar to drink tonight?").  We used to keep bottles of unwanted, foul-tasting Chinese liquor lying around, which we'd offer to him in small sake glasses.  We've learned that just encourages him, like a hungry seagull at the beach, eyeing your hot dogs.  So now we just pretend like we don't drink.
• When Mr. Zhang does decide to take a look the hood, he almost always comes up with the same answer: "我没办法！" which basically translates to "there's nothing I can do."  He sheepishly will whip out his cell phone, call the "specialist" for whatever problem we're having, and invariably reports that they're "particularly busy" and can't come for several days.  Sometimes Mr. Zhang will generate an excuse that makes no sense at all -- "oh, you see, this air conditioning unit isn't big enough to cool the room down" (it was doing a perfectly fine job three days ago!); "see, the heat isn't working because the circuit breaker is down" (right, I know, I called you because I want that to stop happening), etc. etc.
• The whole thing is almost certainly a scam.  We don't have direct contact with our landlord (we don't even know who he/she is), so all of our issues have to go through the building's real estate office.  They apply seemingly random charges to everything we ask them to do.  And what can we do about it?  Refuse to pay and live without hot water for weeks on end?  We occasionally succeed in strong-arming the maintenance dudes to fix our damn apartment for free, but most of the time we're contributing to the building's "let's fuck with the stupid foreigners" fund.  I used to notice an amused glint in the real estate people's eyes every time I'd go down to the office to pay our monthly rent.  Now I think I understand why.

Anyway, it's annoying, but ultimately just the cost of doing business.  We now have 8 spanking new light bulbs, happily installed by one of Mr. Zhang's more helpful colleagues for only 80 kuai (about 13 bucks).  One wonders when they'll burn out again.