Driller killer

This morning was hell. One of our neighbours decided to start doing some drilling work at about 7 o'clock. In any normal country this would be a situation in which you would feel completely justified in calling the police and having them tell him to show some respect for those living around him (though the apartment in question is next to ours, I have no idea who it is as they have a different entrance to the building and a different set of stairs, landing, etc etc). However, for understandable recent-historical reasons the idea of grassing up your neighbours to the authorities is pretty taboo here, so I didn't. Plus it would have taken energy I didn't have, so I instead resorted to just lying in bed wishing that he would be electrocuted by his drill, and then latterly (and in an indication of how knackered I was) falling asleep and incorporating the torturous noise into a dream . Luckily not a dream of dentists or trepanning, but one in which I was staying in a good hotel and someone in the next room was drilling and so I went all the way to the other side of the hotel grounds to locate the customer service people and tell them how pissed off I was, and being able to tell them "Listen, you can even hear it all the way over here". (They gave me a free dinner as a way of making up for the disturbance, which was fair I thought)

Still it's not the best way to wake up. It's bad enough struggling out of sleep thinking of all the unending lists of things you have to do that day, but to wake up and wish painful and juddering electrical death on someone you haven't met (or even, I dare to suggest, someone you have) is not a great frame of mind in which to start the day.

In other recent flat related irritations news, just between our two recent holidays (to Croatia and the UK, since you ask), we had a three day window at home. There was a paper affixed to the door of the building warning us in both Hungarian and Romanian that the hot water would be turned off on one of the days as some repairs were done. Since we don't use the hot water from the central system, but instead have our own gas heater, this was of no great concern to us, so we did nothing about it. In the morning in question, the taps were empty. All of them. Nothing, not a drip nor a drop of water could be found anywhere. I went back outside to check the notices, and discovered that overnight some bureaucratic scamp had been by to cross out the word "hot" in both languages and write in (in pen) "cold" instead. Oh, how we laughed, and didn't get at all annoyed at this little prank, no sirree.