| Our washing machine broke last Tuesday. Sometimes it stalls when switching from the agitator phase to the spin cycle (or whatever they're called - between the phase where the clothes swish around in water to the phase where the water drains). Usually, I can just advance the dial and it will "kick in," but this time it didn't work. Jenn got home from class and asked (somewhat demanded) that I call our landlady, which I did. I had been hesitating to do this, because it's always an ordeal. Any time something breaks, it's my fault. She does it in this sneaky, almost-joking way. "I'll take care of it when I can, but you shouldn't have been doing [this]." Every time. Case in point: When our oven wasn't preheating quickly anymore (it would take over 30 minutes to get to 350 degress), I called her. She told me that she'd have "her guy" look into it, but couldn't guarantee a date, as she didn't know when he was available. She did not tell us to stop using the oven, and we had no reason to think we should. Still, over a week later, Jenn was preheating it and saw sparks through the window outside. Her first thought was that one of our neighbors was using fireworks, until she noticed the smell. It was our oven, and what she saw was the reflection. The electric coil in our oven had snapped (causing the sparks) and was now smoking. Jenn immediately shut off the oven, and I called our landlady. I told her that we needed someone to look at it now, as it had nearly caused a fire. Someone came to look at it the next day. When our landlady came upstairs to talk with us about the incident, she reminded us that it was a new oven (2 years ago) and that we had broken it ("You must have done something. You must have dropped food on the coil.") I told her that this was not true; we hardly used the oven and never dropped anything on the coil. "Then who would you blame?" she asked. My response: "GE?!" [General Electric, the maker of the oven]. I could have said something about how we told her something was going wrong over a week ago, but I didn't think that would get us anywhere. So, when I called to tell her about the washing machine, she said it must have broken "from dancing across the floor too many times when you overload it." Jenn and I both know how to do laundry - we know how to use the settings appropriately and spread the clothes evenly. When the washer is off-balance (and because it's so old, it's always off-balance), we usually run over to stop it and adjust the clothes. I didn't say any of this, because I knew it'd only start an argument, but I was furious. I started looking for a new apartment, and even contacted our realtor about starting to look for a house again. She got it fixed eventually, but left a message for us to call "Management" before using it again. I was still livid, so I asked Jenn to call. Of course, during that conversation, she had to mention that it cost over $200 to fix. She also admonished us to "take good care of it," because she wouldn't be replacing it if it broke again. She mentioned something about overload, and Jenn informed her that it gets off-balance even with only 4 shirts in there. She acknowledged that it was an old machine (but of course, this couldn't be the reason it broke, right?). The kicker, which I did not realize until doing laundry last night, is that the last time our landlady complained about something was when she got the water bill (which she felt was high, and naturally blamed us - even though the bill is not separated by floor). At that time, she said she thought we were doing too much laundry, and asked us to put more clothes in each load.
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