Steve Kupferman

I have an announcement to make

Internet, this week is a glorious week, for I have escaped the hideous gravitational pull of my cruddy, crumbling apartment building and bravely sallied forth into... another apartment.

The new place is rather nice, and reasonably priced.  I'm very happy to have it.  As a result, this post will be the final one to bear the "I hate my building" category flag.

Which is kind of a shame, because I was really only getting warmed up, as far as my litany of grief against the old crib was concerned.  But ultimately I think this is for the best.

The move was amazingly smooth.  I hired Zaid, a soft-spoken Palestinian guy with an almost preternatural talent for stacking boxes and furniture on dollies and then moving the resulting big, wobbly towers of stuff without dropping a thing.  He showed up with a panel van and basically single-handedly conveyed all my possessions into the van and then onto the lawn of the new place, while I held doors and elevators and carried the odd light item just to make myself feel useful.  And he was affordable, too.

His name, again, is Zaid, and he will happily give you a quote if you call him or send him an email.

He told me he'd moved a lot of people out of my building in the past.  "This is an old building," he said.  "They need renovation."  And then he pushed my desk, which he'd gently disassembled into a teetering pile of drawers, out into the lobby on its dolly.

I'm usually resistant to change for the sake of change, but getting out of that building has been my highlight of 2010 to date.

Today, I saw a man get himself forcibly ejected from his apartment building by some kind of steam pipe burst.

And that man was me.

I woke up this morning and spent about an hour happily working away on a little research project, when suddenly my building's fire alarm went off. 

In a building in such poor repair, with so many malfunctioning parts and systems, it really is a credit to the management that this fire alarm works as well as it does.  It makes a shrill, level sort of wailing sound, very loud--and it can keep it up for indefinite periods of time.  It really, really does an excellent job of making you wish you were anywhere but inside your apartment, just as it was intended to.  Horray for technology that works.

Now, ordinarily, when this alarm goes off, it's just some nonsense that isn't worth getting excited about.  Someone microwaved some popcorn for a little too long, or they're just testing the system, or something like that.  This was my initial assumption, so I remained in my seat for the better part of half an hour, unable to type because both of my fingers were in my ears.

Finally, I got fed up, got dressed, grabbed the laptop and opened the door.  The hallway was completely full of white smoke.  Except it wasn't smoke.  I could tell it wasn't, because it didn't make me gag.  It was some kind of white fog, like a steam pipe had burst.  I could hear voices from somewhere at the far end of the hallway, but I couldn't see who was talking because the visibility was too poor.  One of the voices was authoritative, like a fireman.  The other one sounded like the superintendent.

I went outside and chatted with a couple of my neighbors.  Then I went to a Second Cup for the free wi-fi and discovered that Second Cup uses some kind of software to restrict every customer to a maximum of fifteen minutes of free wi-fi use per visit.  I felt like pouring my medium tea out on the floor, but didn't.

People Like to Leave Stuff in My Building's Laundry Room...

My building is a crumbling 1970s high-rise in the Annex.  It's an okay place to live, but if anyone ever falls asleep with a cigarette in their mouth, well... I'm glad I live on a lower floor.

The nice thing about the building is that there's a lot of tenant turnaround (I can't imagine why), so there are occasional freebies to be had.  I am not David Moya, but I do steal his National Post every single day, because he moved out and forgot to cancel his subscription.  Good deal!

There is a dark side to my building's freebeeism, though--and that is the laundry room.  Internet, I will spare your eyes the terrifying sight of some of the reading material on offer down there.  Let's just say it skews towards the Jesus-y and is not terribly well-written, for the most part.

But I will share this one thing with you, that I found on the folding table the other day, just begging to be taken home:

Yes, for the lovely price of zero dollars, I could have had the singular pleasure of assembling Zach Morris' hairless chest, piece by fully interlocking piece.

I passed.