The City of Newark or some unidentified body attempting to represent the fire department is having another fire alarm prank masked as a fire drill today. Since I spoke to the department of fire safety and confirmed that these fire “drills” were not in anyone interest nor were they authorized nor legal we have had at least four more! The fire department even came to the building and said that this could not continue but another drill happened the next day. So whoever is forcing this is doing so with full knowledge that the fire department department of safety said that they were not okay. I don’t think that anyone can argue that this is being done for safety now. The story that I was told was that there is a renegade person in the city offices who is apparently out to get us and is masquarading as someone authorized by the fire department doing these drills illegally. Whether they are trying to harrass the residents of 1180 or if they are trying to get people killed or if they are trying to sully the name of the Newark fire department, I don’t know. But they are definitely making living here not nearly as nice as it should be and the police don’t seem to be taking appropriate action as in any other city, as I have said, this would be considered dangerous and highly illegal.
I called fire safety this morning to let them know that more tests were being done without their approval. They decided to pass me over to the fire chief since there was nothing more that they could do than to just determine that the tests were not allowed to be done. The fire chief was very helpful and is looking into the problem. We will see where things go from here.
Dominica emailed me this morning with the results from Oreo’s blood work that he had done yesterday. All of his levels are back to normal and his blood fat content is actually lower than normal! That means that his new diet is really working. He has trimmed off three ounces as well. Very, very healthy. And also very tired.
Last night my package arrived from Amazon (actually from 47th Street Photo) with the new wide angle adapter and filter set for the Canon Elura 60. It wasn’t expensive at all and now the camera has a lot more range before and should take better pictures in bright sunlight. But the real reason that I got the filters was to protect the camera lense. Remember: Filters are cheap but lenses are expensive. Especially when they are built into the camera itself. The wide angle lense adapter will make shooting video in the car much easier to do. It will help in any tight space. It takes the camera from a fourteen times zoom to a twenty eight with manual intervention.
The weather is amazing today. Warm but not too hot and sunny.
I ended up spending the bulk of the day dealing with the fire alarm issue. It just will never stop. They have set off the fire alarm claiming that they are being told to do so by the city every other week or so since we moved in in September. This is way past inconvenience and into criminal negligence or worse. It is awful. It is like they don’t consider us to be citizens of the city and they couldn’t care less that they are seriously disrupting our home life. Dominica and I are really sick of living in 1180. They don’t treat us like we are important customers but act like they are doing us a favour letting us pay them outrageous amounts of money to live in a tiny little one bedroom apartment where they torture us with loud sounds, refuse to fix things that they guaranteed would be fixed seven months ago with our move in agreement and treating us like squatters.
I tried calling over to the 1180 management offices that are located across the street in 744 Broad and the unintelligible receptionist there claimed that our building’s resident manager didn’t have a boss or report to anyone and that there was no possibility of escalation. I kept arguing that she wasn’t fooling anyone and that obviously he reported to someone and then eventually she gave me a first name but said that he was in a meeting and she would have him call me when he got out. He never called back. But she emailed our resident manager instead to tell him that I had called. Nice run around that they have working there. I called the office in Manhattan and they told me that the guy that Broad Street said was in a meeting wasn’t even in the office today.
After hours of dealing with the fire alarm issue just today and after months of dealing with it in general I finally convinced 1180 to turn over the name of the person that they claim is providing authorization to perform the fire alarm tests. It was late in the day and I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe I will get a chance to deal with it tomorrow. Hopefully. This is really impacting our qualify of life. Today they ran five or six fire alarms and didn’t call us ahead of time so Oreo was in shear panic. He was shacking and had an accident because he was so scared. 1180 Raymond is anything but pet friendly. There are many dogs and probably cats in this building who are home alone being put through bi-weekly torturous fire drills that go on and on sometimes for over an hour. I had checked ahead of time today and we were told that today’s alarm would only last for thirty seconds or so but the test ran on for at least twenty minutes with the alarm going on and off.
I got a chance to do a little cleaning around the house today in preparation for dad coming down this weekend. But not nearly as much as I would have hoped. I really didn’t manage to get much of anything done today. It was just a crappy day. Nothing went right at all. This is why I want to move out of 1180. I should never lose an entire day to my “luxury” apartment making my life suck. Paying over two grand a month to live here seems a bit much for Newark and being treated like this. It isn’t like either Min or I even work in Newark. This is totally not worth it. We could live anywhere for these prices. Anywhere except Manhattan and we absolutely would never have this kind of thing happen in NYC. Ever. Not after 9/11. This is like a project to make attacks easier for terrorist. Prepping everyone to not even consider the possibility that the alarm might actually be real.
Dominica got her hair done before coming home tonight. She got home and we went over to Food for Life for dinner.