I guess, I never realized that one of the blessings of where I live is that you never have any ads in your mail box. Well. Hardly ever. Because there are those rare occasions in which you actually find a student or organization kindly offering their services and generously placing some info paper in your mail box. But as I said: those occasions are rare. Unless you count the services offered by the kids of our dear foreign faculty colleagues. Ever since I first got here, a few of them have advertised their services by placing posters around the foreign faculty residences, offering to take out your trash, water your plants, do your shopping, dust your home, and clean your floors, etc. Until recently. A short while ago, they got smarter. Now they don’t limit their advertising to posters, now they’ve found that a new method may actually be more effective. And so recently, I keep finding little notices sticking on the door to my apartment, notices that you can’t just ignore. I guess, someone …

The routine goes as follows: you find something is broken in your home. You inform the front desk, who in turn informs the workers. You give a time frame for when it’s convenient for you to have the workers come. You wait. And when everything goes properly, the workers will show up eventually (though most likely not at the time you specified, or the time you’re waiting for them), and the problems get solved. That’s when you’re lucky. But then, things always change. These days, I find things rather reversed. These days, it’s the front desk calling me on my way to breakfast (it’s 7 am in the morning). They tell me, “You’ve got a problem in your home.” “I do?” I say. “Yes. A Leak.” “Nothing’s wet in my apartment. Though I had a leak a couple weeks ago.” “Yes, but the office underneath your apartment has water coming down the walls.” “Oh. I see.” “So, can we send in a worker to fix this problem?” “Sure,” I say, and quickly tell them that …