the week of leaks.

Our super, as in superintendent, not that he's just really great, is a good ol' boy named Charlie.

He gets up at 4:30 am every morning, though I'm not sure why. But whenever we have a problem he needs to fix or look at, that puts him knocking at our door at about 7 am. For those of you not in college, that is not acceptable. He's always very friendly, friendly in that slow southern way. He has a daughter about our age, and sometimes he tells me about her and how she uses a computer all the time, but he just doesn't understand them.

We see Charlie every once in a while, more in the winter when he comes down to put salt on our walkway. We saw an awful lot of Charlie this week, on account of the leak above the sink. First it was a drip drip drip whenever the people upstairs took a shower. So Charlie came by, felt the pipes some and did some caulking.

The next night it was a drip drip drip in three different places. So we wrote a note and left it on the door of the rental office upstairs which led to Charlie's second early morning visit, which also did not help and appeared to make the problem worse again.

These visits would not be so bad if he were doing some quiet like standing still in the middle of the kitchen or making us breakfast. Unfortunately, the leaks require him to be banging on pipes at early hours.

After the unsuccessful second visit, Charlie decided the issue required the calling of professional plumbers. Luckily for us, the problem was upstairs, so our upstairs neighbors had to deal with about three plumbers in their apartment banging and drilling all day long for a problem that wasn't even theirs.

Charlie came back again on the fourth day at 7 am just to check on us and see if there was any sign of leaking. Thankfully, there was not.

It's easy for us to complain about the early morning invasion of our apartment, but we would have been complaining a lot louder had he not tried to fix it so promptly or had the ceiling above our kitchen fallen in, bringing the neighbors bathroom with it.

This was the first morning in several that we haven't heard Charlie's knock at 7 am. Not that it mattered, since the phone rang at 6 am. Completely unacceptable.