Send hot water

Yesterday I got up and took a shower in water that could not have been much more than 50 degrees. Today I took a shower that started out a little better than room temperature but ended up freezing when someone else turned on one of the other showers. The hot water on Monday was also closer to what I would call cold. I am not a happy camper.

So this evening I got back from dinner to find an email from housing and dining, subject: Wien Hall Hot Water Heaters. Great! thought poor unsuspecting me, this will mean they fixed the problem... but no, apparently the problem might not even become fixable for over a week. From the email:

We have experienced a malfunction of one of our two heating coils that provide hot water to the building.

While we do have hot water, during periods when many students are using the showers simultaneously there is a chance of experiencing shorter supplies or temporary outages due to the demand being placed on the one remaining coil. The coil is a commercial part which is not readily available, and therefore repairs can not be completed before December 15th.

Ok... I was using the precious lukewarm water supply at around 3:30pm. I suspect that this is not a peak showering period and yet the water temperature went from tolerable to freezing after three minutes when one other person turned on the water. WTF??? This doesn't strike me as chance of shorter supplies, temporary outages, blah... it seems like they're pretty much given.

We are exploring possible interim solutions such as renting a "temporary boiler" but at this point have not identified an effective alternative.

Please note that this is an inconvenient situation that could not be avoided (coils are contained within boilers and there is no way to predict when they will fail) but we will do our best to help minimize the impact of this problem between now and December 15th.

Unavoidable??? because they can't tell when they're going to fail??? I could understand if this were a private residence or something but CU is an institution... If you understand that a part might fail at any time, completely unpredictably you keep extra parts or a backup heater or something on hand. I could live with a day or two of cold water owing to random acts of the malevolent Wien Hot Water God but a week and a half is insane.

Ok, enough of this ranting. I will adopt a positive attitude: cold showers are awesome. I will now begin the countdown until I have the joy of taking another one: 14:00:00, 13:59:59 . . .