A view in city living

The apartment

The chute is at the end of the corridor to the right, through four doors, some serving as fire doors and others I am yet to properly determine apart from the fact that one of them is useful.

The communal living in an apartment block offers an interesting social experiment in engaging with people you don’t know but leave the evidence of both their existence and irritation.

The building we access with electronic codes and are not supposed to let anyone tailgate us into the building if they are unknown to us. Yet, we all somehow work on the premise that anyone who follows so closely behind us probably has business in the building that is unlikely to be nefarious.

The people

I am of a reticent disposition, I rarely tailgate access to a building where I am a guest, I will wait for the host to acknowledge me and give me access to the building. At certain times, my bell rings and the person at the door is unknown, to the unknown, I will not provide access, no matter the tales they have to tell.

Our post-boxes stacked on each other within a hall to the back entrance is on two sides on the walls and there is nothing as irksome as receiving junk mail, but worse still is those who drop their unneeded mail on the floor. I will be asking the concierge to keep an eye on the closed circuit television camera to catch out the culprit.

I could not help but notice that someone had taken a brutal implement to the post box for flat 27 and the door to the post box is left open, warped and damaged. It is likely that the occupant of that apartment is tenant rather than an owner because no owner would nominally exhibit such vandalism.

The chute

The room where the electricity meters are for each floor sees much activity; parcels and packages delivered to the concierge who serves many purposes including this; storing the goods in this room which is more a cubicle.

The activity in that space presages inactivity in my department, thrice goods have been stored there and in the process, the main switch to my apartment tripped off. There was a time I was away in South Africa and after the first week out of four I could no more contact my computer, well, the power had gone and with that, all was stored in my freezer went to waste with an unbearable stink.

That was a number of visits to the chute that allows every floor to send their household rubbish and waste apart from recycled stuff to the huge waste bins in the basement. You chuck your rubbish in the chute and it should slide down and land with a thud that you should hear.

Sometimes, it requires the swinging of the chute door to allow the bag fall through, yet some on my floor do not wait to see that their rubbish has left the receptacle and fallen into the bin. Usually, these are bigger than normal bags and it takes a bit of working at to let the bag fall through before you could put yours in.

The Concierge

The absence of housetraining that includes the consideration of others is evident in these bugbears, litter, rubbish, spills, smells, blockages, noise and those are just a few of the problems with sharing an apartment block. Were it not for the presence of the concierge to attend to some of these issues, existence here would have bordered on the unbearable.

This is life in the city centre, the conveniences, however, almost always outweigh the inconveniences.