The Flooded Basement Trap: Why a Thoughtful Neighbor Is Reeling After a Vacant Homeowner Exploded on the Phone
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When you’re a kid and something goes horribly wrong, you’ll ideally have a parent, guardian, teacher, or other trusted adult that you can turn to. Because when we’re small, we don’t have the capacity to make rational decisions under pressure, especially in emergencies, and we need a grown up to scoop us up and save the day, making all the vital decisions and reassuring us along the way.
But when an emergency happens to you as an adult, you can often find yourself feeling like you need someone to come along and save the day, especially if you don’t do so well under pressure. But you are the adult now, so unless there is someone else nearby, it’s down to you to do the kind of action that your trusted adult would have done for you in the past – it’s your time now.
That’s the situation the guy in this story found himself in when his neighbour’s water pipe broke on New Year’s Eve. It shouldn’t have been his problem, but knowing he was the only person around, he had to jump to action.
Read on to find out what happened.
Neighbour berates me for having his water turned off
It’s the afternoon of New Years Eve, and some water pipe is gushing out of my neighbour’s front yard all spilling downhill onto my property.
His property not much affected. I don’t discover it until my stucco wall is swimming in water.
It’s covered about a 200 ft driveway (mine) and neighbors aren’t home.
Their number is not on the neighborhood map because they didn’t put it on there.
So this neighbour did the best they could to deal with the situation.
I knock on the door. I call other neighbours, trying to get their number.
Of course no one is home.
I called emergency water shut off. They came pretty soon. It was really coming fast.
I finally found my neighbour’s number online and called him.
Read on to find out how his neighbour responded.
He was two states away and was mad because I didn’t let him call a plumber instead of calling the city people.
Now, he says, he won’t have water for two days (not true, but whatever).
I actually apologised to him because I was so flabbergasted that he didn’t thank me for catching the issue. I hate it when I apologize unnecessarily.
I sent pictures. I think he understands now.
It was so rude of his neighbour to respond this way.
He clearly didn’t understand quite how dire the situation was.
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His neighbour went above and beyond to help, and he treats him like this?
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Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.
This person thought the rude neighbour was totally out of line.
While others congratulated him on being a great neighbour, even though his neighbour wouldn’t.
In a situation like this one, you just have to do what you can. Water was literally gushing from this guy’s property, to the extent it could have flooded his home and other people’s too, or at the very least cost him a monumentally large water bill, and his neighbour spend his precious time on New Year’s Eve trying to work to solve the problem. And he did the very best he could, given that no one was home in the neighbourhood and he couldn’t reach his neighbour to find a solution.
Sometimes, you just have to make an executive decision, and in calling someone to shut off the water, he made the best decision he could have made. The fact that his neighbour berated him for that, instead of actually thanking him, shows some real red flags about the other guy’s personality. He should have been grateful he didn’t get home to a very wet house, not angry with the guy for the temporary fix.
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