Zurich - Toilet Problems

All Solved!

Although everything in my flat was generally fine when I returned back to Zurich, a small trickle of water was constantly running in my toilet. I worried at first as to whether it could flood, but that didn’t seem to happen; it was, however, a waste of water.

I went into my rental agent to ask for a plumber to fix it and they suggested that I contact the Hauswart (janitor) instead since he may be able to fix it. I didn’t even know that we had a janitor. Actually, that’s a bit of a funny word in English because in the UK we don’t really have janitors in blocks of flats. In Germany, though, it was common and it’s also common in Egypt, so weirdly I know the word for janitor in German and Arabic even though it’s a word I barely use in English. But I digress…

So, I had to phone the janitor, which was a pain as I don’t like the phone. However, I braved it (but left it for a day while I psyched myself up). He turned out to be very nice on the phone and spoke fairly clearly, so it was all OK. I had a clear image in my head of him being small, in his early 60s, balding but with some grey hair, and with a big smile. It’s strange how you get an idea of the person when you just speak to them on the phone.

Anyway, it ended up being very Swiss because the appointment was for Saturday at 08:30am. They really are obsessed with early morning starts over here. So much for my weekend lie-in! The doorbell rang at the appointed time, maybe even a bit earlier, but I was completely confused when I opened the door and saw a young, thin guy standing there with long black hair and a serious expression. That’s not what I thought the janitor looked like! He saw my confusion and then himself got confused as to whether he’d got the right address. I just couldn’t get over it as I’d really got it into my head that he would be in his 60s.

He fiddled around for a while with my toilet but in trying to mend it, he made it worse. Water now gushed down constantly into the toilet rather than it being just a trickle. He explained that he’d tried three or four different solutions, but actually each thing in the toilet was broken. My flat is quite old, so I’m not really so surprised. Anyway, I was left with a worse-functioning toilet and a temporary solution of pushing in a stick to stop the water from gushing through all the time and taking it out when needed so that the cistern fills and then flush the toilet manually. However, the water went through so quickly, the cistern didn’t really have time to fill up, so I also had to pour jugs of water in at the same time, and fast enough that it didn’t already go through before I got to the second jug, so that I had enough water to give it a proper flush. I ended up flushing the toilet only when I really had to.

He said they’d make an appointment for me with the plumber. I thought I hadn’t understood, since I couldn’t comprehend how they could know when I would be available, but it turned out that the plumber would phone me. Ugh! On the plus side, I pointed out my dripping tap that the plumber didn’t fix last time because I hadn’t got agreement from the rental agent. The young guy took a photo of it dripping and agreed that the plumber could also do that at the same time.

The plumber managed to phone me just as I was about to go into a meeting, so I had to ask him to phone me back. On top of that, he rattled away in Swiss German, so I had to ask him to speak high German, but I still found his accent pretty difficult. Fortunately, he made an appointment at 11am (that’s more like it!) and turned up 30 mins early looking more like I expected the janitor to look like. Because he was early, I hadn't gone through the fiasco of flushing the toilet, so had the embarrassing task of doing it (fairly incompetently) while he looked on.

He was so Swiss I was a bit scared he would be hostile to me as a foreigner (don’t ask me why I’m scared of that, there’s no rationale behind it at all), but although he looked a bit serious when he came in, he ended up coming across as kind, friendly, and trustworthy. And he fixed my toilet (and my tap)!