Random Story – The broken window

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Many years ago, I moved into my first apartment.  It was this old house that had been split up into five or six apartments, and my apartment was the third floor.  I was excited and wanted to move everything in, but it was July and it felt like 100 degrees.  For my first trip, I didn’t have a fan or anything, but I figured I’d open the windows to get some air movement.  But when I started opening the windows, I found that the landlord had put a fresh coat of paint on the window sills, and they either hadn’t waited for the paint to fully dry before closing them, or they didn’t open them to begin with.  The windows in the living room weren’t that bad and I was able to force them open.  But when I went to force open one of the windows in the kitchen, I was able to get it open, but it jerked so fast that my elbow broke the glass and I got a cut on my arm.  For the rest of the windows, I got a screwdriver and broke the paint seal before carefully opening them.

Not only did I break a window, I found that one window in the hallway had a hole in it from before I moved in.  The next day I had to sign some papers with my landlord company, so I told them about the window with a hole in it from before I moved in, and the one window I accidently broke.  They said they’d have someone around to fix them.

The window in the kitchen wasn’t one pane of glass, but rather nine small panes and one of them was what I broke.  A couple of weeks or a month after I moved in, a guy came out to measure the pane to replace it.  And then nothing happened.

That winter, I noticed when I sat in the living room that a draft came the hallway window with a hole in it.  To seal it off I cut the side out of a cereal box and taped it over the hole.  Sometime in early spring, one of the landlords was looking at the house, and saw my taped over hole and figured that wasn’t a good look for the property since it was on the side facing the street, so somebody came out and replaced the hallway window.  So the window that was broken when I moved in was finally fixed, it just took about eight months. 

As to the kitchen window, I think when the guy fixed the hallway window, I pointed out the kitchen window, and he came back one day to remove the shards from the broken pane and measure it to get the right size.  And then nothing happened.

I only stayed in that apartment for a year, but I had broken a window on the day I moved in, told the landlord about it the next day, had it measured to be replaced, twice, but it was still broken the day I moved out.  Fortunately, I wasn’t billed for any repairs.  In the following years, I had two other apartments in the same general area, but I never went through that company again.