All those years of watching MacGyver paid off

Late last night I had two waterfalls in my apartment: one in my bedroom and one in my kitchen. The one in my kitchen was turning the linoleum floor into a linoleum lake, and the one in the bedroom was just soaking the carpet. I had tried stuffing towels along the bottom of the windows, but the towels soaked through in about 15 seconds and the waterfall returned. I called maintenance and left one of my trademark 20-minute-long messages (I'm exaggerating, of course—it was under 10 minutes), decrying the sorry state of affairs in which the maintenance staff did not respond quickly and effectively to reports of gallons of water streaming into an apartment, as I had notified them of this problem the Monday before last, when it first happened. I am NOT exaggerating about the gallons of water. My bucket holds 14 quarts, and it was filled last night in under 20 minutes.

As part of my attempts to keep the water from reaching my possessions and/or my ankles, I decided to clean out the window tracks. Maybe there was so much dirt piled up inside that the water wasn't able to drain? Worth a shot. As I was doing this, the screen wiggled. I found it could be pushed up, leaving a small slot at the bottom where rain might, just might drain out faster than it could fill the track and overflow into my apartment. I cut fabric swatches I didn't need and shoved them under the screen. No more rain through the window last night, as far as I could tell. Though it was already calming down before my ingenious plan.

Then today, in moving things around the office, it came to our attention that the proposed new position of a shelf would block off a light switch. I tried taping several pencils together to use as a heightened switch, and that was precarious. Then I thought of taping a chain to the switch, which works better. (Why couldn't we just move the shelf over an inch? Because that would make the shelf ends uneven. Which was going to bother at least three of us, in the long run.)

I also used a paper clip as a screwdriver today. Really.