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One of my Armenian neighbors showed up at my door yesterday, asking, “Is worker here? Work, You get work done?” Something like that. I try not to be irritated with my neighbors who have lived here since the 1980s and cannot even answer what time is it in English, they have learned maybe five words in all that time.

I tell him, yeah, go ahead talk to him.

Juan is in the bathroom with the door closed, he closes it as soon as he gets here to work, as he knows otherwise I will be standing there taking pictures, and the slumlord has given him instructions not to let me see the sewage that's accumulated under the bathroom floor. I don't care as long as it’s getting fixed, I'm okay.

Downstairs neighbor Armenian man stands at the bathroom door and says, “Open Door. Open Door.”

Juan says in his own broken English, “I’m busy, I’m putting in the floor,”

And Armenian man just keeps hollering, “Open door, open door.” Juan peeks out, I see he’s already put the new vinyl down so there’s nothing left for me to get a picture of but I'm not going to the housing authority anyway now, they finally put in the floor. Yesterday they left promising a new floor in the morning, this morning, at 11 I called and the woman in the office said, “I don't have any idea what you're talking about.”

Twilight Zone time again. This is what happens when you need maintenance from a slum lord. You HAVE to throw weight around, you have to holler and threaten.

"I will go to the L.A Housing Authority tomorrow," I said.

She quipped, "Go ahead and do whatever you want."

You have to throw the weight around.

"I will take pictures of that standing water that's been sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool for two years."

She gets snippy, "Go ahead and do whatever you want."

The Sea Witch roars:

“I don't want to have to take time off work to go down in person to the L.A. Housing Authority to get this problem solved, Erica. There is shit in my floor, I can’t even go barefoot in the bathroom.”

Juan showed up an hour or so later. But at first she wasn’t going to send him. . .

It took that much work to get sewage removed from my bathroom floor.

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Now Juan tells the Armenian neighbor, “Call it in,” and slams the door on him. Everyone is rude everywhere these days, so I say to him, “Do you have Erica’s number?”

He hollers how he called her at six in the morning, and then it becomes to him my fault. He’s angry at me. I put my headphones on and go back to my job, Scream Queens Season 2, transcribing the banal utterings of these fems as they bop around in a Beverly Hills mansion in yet another reality TV show.

Okay fifteen minutes later Armenian neighbor downstairs is again in my door and I say, “Juan is still working and So am I, please just wait, he’ll come down and talk to you when he’s done.”

Instead Armenia decides to walk right in my house. I know he just doesn't understand English enough to know I'm saying, go away don’t bother me politely, so I say it louder, “No, leave, I'm working, don’t bother me.”

He stands in the doorway and says, “You see, I turn off Your Water. It will be bad for You!” And storms down the stairs to sit in his house which is what he does all day, it never dawns on these people to go out and volunteer or something because you’d learn something and maybe even end up learning the language and having a job in the end. They just sit there collecting Social Security. And I can’t get Social Security because they keep telling me I'm not sick, when most of the time I'm too crippled to even get down the stairs. I fester in anger up here about a thousand things every day and that's one of them that's been popping up now for years as I keep getting denied and denied and I have to buy stronger better headphones because my gossiping and complaining neighbors are in the courtyard hollering so loud most of the time I can’t even hear the utterings of the reality TV stars to transcribe them…

Anyway, this morning I get up at 4:30 even though the alarm is set for 5:00 because that's just the kind of person I am. I go in the bathroom, flush - yep no water. The bastard turned off my water last night, after ten when I did the dishes, late last night, My Armenian hostile hating Americans but living off of us for thirty years neighbor turned off my wtare. Now when I'm up at 4:30 to GO TO MY JOB THAT PAYS HIS FUCKING SOCIAL SECURITY I can’t even take a shower or brush my teeth.

So I have someone else to be mad at this morning besides the pope, everyone in the Vatican and my Beverly Hills slumlord.

Good, it’s after 6 AM, I can call the maintenance people and complain about this now.