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?