Thursday, November 13, 2008

Repair work


I just wanted to follow up on the water leak damage from a while back. They sent someone to clean a spot on the rug from the leak. They worked on this little quarter size spot that is otherwise covered by the ottoman for an hour I think! It still didn't come all the way out, and I tried to tell them that really it was okay...had they seen the rest of the cream colored carpet? It's now polka dotted from the children, so it really was okay, I didn't care about the stain. At the same time I didn't want to offend their efforts. Very tricky.

A week later they came back to repair a stain on the ceiling. Everything in these apts are wallpapered including the ceiling. So, they needed 3 hours to take down a section and put up new wallpaper - or ceiling paper. Again, they are so polite and apologetic and there are usually 3 or 4 men accompanying the job: the worker, the supervisor, the guy from the rental company and the doorman (mostly for translation, I think). When they showed up to repair the ceiling - they brought a gift to apologize for the inconvenience. Seriously! They hand to us this tin of cookies, nicely packaged with thick wrapping paper and gold twine...all because they were fixing something for us and had to be in our way - although they never were. It felt very awkward. But, after I bit into one of these flaky, sugary, buttery leaf-shaped confections I was grateful for the Japanese way.

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