Soviet manufacturing

Midnight, Krakow time. I am now finally getting to bed after an hour of mopping and using towels and rags to clean up the mess left by the demise of the Soviet-era refrigerator that used to serve my apartment. (It really is Soviet; the dials were all in Cyrillic script and it looked like something out of the 1950s.) The fridge started leaking this morning, and by this afternoon we had to turn it off for defrosting because it had apparently become so waterlogged that it couldn't take any more. Then, after cleaning up most of the water on the kitchen floor, I chanced to nudge the pan under the unit with my foot…producing a new cascading torrent. Lovely. I think it's under control now, although this does leave me quite without any way to store most food. So I either have to a) eat out; b) use one of the students' refrigerators or the common one at CES temporarily; or c) only buy enough for one meal and toss whatever I don't eat. None of these are particularly appealing.

The Soviet system's inability to produce consumer goods is legendary; until now I had never actually been on the receiving end of it. Now I can check that one off of my list -- after I change my socks.

[Posted with ecto]