I'm sure I've mentioned what delightful fun I'm having as the Vice President of
my co-op board, what with the weird people in the building, and the puddles of
poop, and the garage door gate that happened to short out and permanently close
itself on Superbowl Sunday. Actually, I'm only being half-serious; it's a
pretty fun (volunteer) job, and I'm learning a lot about the inner workings of
buildings and homeownership.
Sometimes, though, funny stuff happens, and I want to tell you about it. As part of my tenure on the board, I am trying to find ways to cut costs in the building and keep fees from increasing, and one of these methods was to investigate ways to keep from heating and cleaning the pool year-round when it only gets used half the time.
So, ok, I got a solar panels guy to come talk to us about that, and then next on my list was trying to find out about pool covers for the oddly-shaped pool. I was having no luck with this at all, as it seems that oddly-shaped pool covers cost even more than the money we would be saving by having one. Still, I hate to give up until I have all the evidence, so last week, when the pool guy was here cleaning the pool, I was all "hey, can you make us a pool cover?". I swear to God, the guy looked at me like I had just blasphemed his grandmother, and he's like "oh, no NO-- no pool cover! Pool covers kill! Pool covers, oh my gosh, if you just step on the pool, the pool cover will SUCK YOU UNDER and KILL YOU, and your liability insurance will go up, and......!" and his face was turning all red and he was getting all upset, and I was like "allright already, cool off, no one's getting a deadly pool cover today, I get your point, I'm just trying to cut down the building's electric bill."
That's when he came back to reality, stopped gasping, and said "oh, why didn't you say so? Just reset the timer on the pump so that it runs six hours instead of ten," and just like that, he did it.
All I'm saying is, I find it so amusing when people are so totally outraged by things that would never even occur to you, so that an innocent question becomes an affront to their sensibilities, you know what I mean?
