Gov Showers

In what seems like another lifetime ago, I moved into a house I rented from the government. It was a tiny thing, no actual foundation, totally crooked to the road, built in the late 1920's and forever maintained with parts from that era. We used to joke it was always cold because it was insulated with newspapers from the teens... The nineteen-teens.

It had been built right when indoor plumbing was becoming a hot, new thing. I knew this because another employee once told me that was what the Jack and Jill set up was about. The tiny house's one bathroom had two doors. Both which opened into opposite bedrooms. The idea behind this, apparently, was that people could go from the bathroom to their bedroom without having to transverse a hallway where, gasp, someone they weren't married to could see them in their bedclothes!

But you can imagine, this made it weird when you had people over. If they wanted to use the bathroom, they had to go through a bedroom. But the neighborhood people were used to it. What really made it weird was the fact the government had painted the original doors in lead paint, and then painted the lead paint in non-lead paint to encapsulate the lead paint, in a bathroom, so the doors didn't fit into the doorframes after nearly 100 years of shrinking and swelling, and coats of gloopy paint.

So when you were in the bathroom, the doors didn't really shut, and original skeleton key locks had long since lost their keys, so using the bathroom when someone else was in the house was really an honor system kind of thing. And forget trying to be quiet. Everyone heard everything.

But the scariest part of the bathroom was the shower. Smaller than some RV showers, the shower was a kit model which had been installed after they clearly ripped out a clawfoot tub. It was so small you couldn't raise your elbows to wash your hair without hitting the walls.

This part was fine. What wasn't fine was the door, made of glass and metal, didn't really open from the inside. To get out, you had to kick it.

Which made me nervous. I had a lot of daymares of kicking my way out of the shower only to shatter the glass and cut my femoral, and then have to call my co-workers, the people who staffed the ambulance, to hopefully come save me from bleeding out while I was naked in my own house.

So I put in a work order to get it fixed.

A few months after I asked for it to be fixed, one of the maintenance guys showed up.

Both chewing gum and with a wad of chew in his lip, he pulled and pushed on the door, his face unimpressed.

"Well, here's your problem," he said, door open so I could see the door's little latch bolt.

He pointed a bored finger to something next to the bolt. It looked like...

"Someone fixed your shower door with gum."

The sticky mess was gum. He peeled it off and unceremoniously threw it in the trash.

"Oh, and the idiot who installed the door installed it upside down," he said.

"Um, can you turn it the right way?"

He shook his head like I'd asked him to make a quick run to Jupiter and back.

"Well can I get a new one then?"

"Nah."

"Why not?"

"This thing is old. They don't make parts for this model anymore."

"Then I guess I need a new shower?"

He looked at me like I was seven and had said something so ignorant it was cute. Then he shifted his attention back to the door and opened and closed it a few more times. It still didn't really open.

"Tell you what, I'll just fix the door."

"Yeah. That would be great," I said.

He got out a drill and drilled several holes into the metal frame that held the glass. When he was done, the door mostly opened, and mostly stayed shut when in the shut position. To say it was 'fixed' was a bald faced lie, but it did open without having to kick it.

"Good as new," he said.

"Is that true?"

"Sure." And he left.

And the thing is. For a gov shower. He wasn't wrong.

But he also wasn't right.