For more than a month, we were having a water heater problem. For some reason, the water heater only worked when we opened the tap nearest to the heater. So whenever we had to take a shower, we would go to that tap, turn it on, come back to the bathroom, turn on the shower, go back to the tap again and turn it off and come back to take a shower. It was a pain but at least we were able to take a hot shower which mattered most at that time. We were also wasting a lot of water because if we dared to turn the shower off while we were shampooing, we would need a lot of luck to get hot water again. Basically we were having the "jumpstart" problem. (Once we jumpstarted the car, it worked but as soon as we stopped, we had to jumpstart it again.) At least 4 weekends passed, but the problem didn't get fixed. We called our rental agent, she said we had to fix it ourselves. She didn't give us any hint on what could be the problem. My flatmate Walter checked with a plumbing agency, we got an appointment for 2 weeks later. Two days back my second flatmate Kapil along with our friend Anil looked underneath the heater and found a small box. He wondered what it was and guess what, it was a battery placeholder. So he suggested we could change battery and see if it works. Yesterday, Walter got 2 new batteries, changed the old ones and voila! the water heater started working again. For a simple thing like that, we waited more than a month and always dreaded to enter a shower wondering if suddenly we could get no hot water.

Yesterday we also fixed one another problem. After we got internet at our flat, I was not able to access it from my room because it was supposedly not in the range of or blocked from the wireless router. So whenever I wanted to use internet, I would either go to living room or our study room. We thought about putting the router in a different location to have access from my room but in those locations, we didn't have either a phone outlet or a power outlet. I could have put the router in my room, but then then we couldn't access it from our living room. It didn't sound logical not to have internet access in the living room as we all would be using the room time to time. Then few days back, I got a long RJ45 cable to hook my room directly to the router (ie without using wireless). When I was thinking of how to take it to my room without making the corridor look cluttered and without letting it get snapped by our doors, Kapil thought about taking the telephone connection from my room and using power outlet in his room. (Only my room and the living room have phone outlets.) Kapil's room is in the straight line view both from my room and the living room.

                      _______________________
       kapil's room* |                  *living room
                     |   _________________
                     |   |
                     |   |
                     |   |
                     |   |
                     |   |
                    my room                            

That idea worked. Although his room looked cluttered from phone wire, at least, we had wireless access in all the rooms. Even better, he found that there was a phone outlet in a "nobody would know" point in the study room. Since the study room was closer to my room, I was able to get wireless access in my room. Bravo Kapil! we got the best solution after one semester was over.

In retrospect, we were just tired or didn't have much time to explore all these options but perhaps we were stupid too not to figure out these options earlier!! What do you think?