Who Do I Call?

On Monday, I got a phone call in the morning. I picked it up expecting to hear from Oliver as pretty much no one else ever calls here (if you call from outside the system, you often get a busy signal - and it can go on for hours.. I don't think anyone we know has that much stamina). I rely on email to keep up with people off-island, and most people here I just talk to in person because we will inevitably run into each other some where on base.

So, anyway, the phone rang and after wrestling it out of my two year old's hands (who absolutely must be the one to pick it up first), I was shocked to discover it was a guy who handled maintenance for housing. He wanted to know if he could send over a couple carpenters to fix a couple things in the bathroom. Things that we had requested repaired four months ago. After scratching my head over this one, I said sure and they were knocking at my door about five minutes later.

When we moved here, a woman in charge of housing walked us through the house and handled our paperwork. I asked who to call if something happened, thinking it was a pretty straight-forward, easily handled question. Apparently not, as is all too often the case here. She looked at us in confusion for a bit, then told us that since we were Navy, we were taken care of by someone else. And she didn't know who that someone was.

I wasn't sure what to say to that, but I did make sure to ask her if we could get our washer looked at, and a couple wall fixtures in the boys' bathroom repaired. She said she could take care of that, and the next day a nice Bahamian gentlemen came to take apart our slow-agitating washing machine, proclaim it fine (I guess it's just a loser of a machine), and leave. No one ever came to fix the things in the bathroom. Because they weren't life altering, we just let them be, although Oliver did repair the towel rack that kept falling off the wall soon after.

Ironically, that same day Oliver had emailed someone to see if a leaking pipe in the kitchen could be repaired. He had to fill out a form, which he sent back the same way. While the bathroom guys were still in our trailer, another guy knocked on the door to fix the pipe. So, we are now fully repaired, but as baffled as ever. We were warned sometimes things can take awhile when we first got here, but four months seems to be stretching it. We're not exactly living on a huge base. However, the leaking pipe got fixed within hours of notification, so that is a positive sign.

I'm really not sure what to expect in the future. Mostly, I'm hoping I don't have to find out.