A water fiasco

Or: A day for hating my apartment complex.

So this morning I decide to get up and put in the relaxer my hair so desperately needs. (For those who don’t know what a relaxer is, think “perm”, but for straightening instead of making curly.)

Relaxers have pretty strict ideas for how long they should be in. I typically leave a strong perm in for just over 20 minutes, which is just about the longest they suggest (for uber-nappy hair, although mine doesn’t really qualify as that).

Fifteen minutes into the process–goop still in hair–just after I had rinsed my hands so I could start cleaning up the mess… the water in my apartment turns off.

…The fuck?

So I call the maintenance guy and I’m all like, “D00d, I’m in the middle of a time-sensitive, water-requiring thing and my water just turned off!”

He’s all like, “Twenty minutes, bitch. There’s a leak. Get off my nuts.” Actually, he was rather nice about it. But there are water problems here almost weekly, no lie.

It actually took twenty-five minutes, and those were twenty-five minutes I ignored the burning of my ears and kept telling myself that maybe my father and auntie Lisa are right, and that if your hair and scalp are in good enough shape, you can leave one of these things in all day with no worries…

When the water came back on, it was rust-filled and icky. So there were five more minutes I spent letting water just run while my ears burned. Then I finally got the shit out and the neutralizing stuff in.

Forty-five minutes. I still have hair (even if it’s a little straighter than I prefer), and I’m just hoping there won’t be a delay reaction in which all my hair falls out the moment I get off the plane in Arizona.