My dear English-speaking “followers”, you might already have seen this very long post in a language you do not understand. Well, here comes the English version. It is long too… But has some cool pictures in it!
I have not written anything in quite a long time. Many things have happened meanwhile. First of all, there was this rather round birthday. I had planned to look it straight in the eyes and have a huge, fabulous party, preferably convince my friends to go to Berlin (it’s only a 2h drive with the new highway!), find a great concert (this time though in a club where I would not be afraid of losing a kidney)…Then it turned out that my PhD defense date was set for two days after the birthday, so all plans went to hell.
I did defend the thesis! This is good at least. You can oficially call me Dr, and you will be able to call me that even more oficially when the decision passes through the science council. My new business cards are on the way nonetheless
I am planning on writing a post especially dedicated to this subject… Maybe not on the defense per se, but the 4 years I spent trying to get a PhD in a Polish university. There’s plenty stories to tell, and advice and warnings to give. Slow down, though, I almost forgot what made my turn Parenthood off. This is not a good moment by any means.
As some of you may know, I live in an old part of town, very close to the city centre. The housing cooperative has only 10 owners, most of whom actually live here, so you would imagine people would want to cooperate nicely and have good relations with their neighbours.
Only briefly will I mention my neighbours Z., who are very nice and cool people and always invite us to share whatever they are having, but who display this rare and extreme type of carelessness that makes them, for instance, light a fire in a tile stove that has not been used for 20 years, without checking out with the chimney sweep (we woke up in a cloud of black smoke and called the fire department).
I will skip the neihgbour N., who has not paid his liabilites to the cooperative for months, even though he has a few cars, and most Sundays he spends with his family in high brow Poznań restaurants, explaining to the other neighbours he meets in the street that “a man of a certain age is allowed to certain his habits.”
Today I am going to focus on amore camouflaged case.
I will start by telling an old story. It should have warned me in time, but somehow I stopped paying attention to it at point. Some two years after I moved to this flat my now-husband and I decided to stop living in a 5 people commune and transform the flat to meet just our needs. We started (and pretty much ended) the refurbishing with the bedroom. It is the only room located at the backyard side of the building, which means no trams and no night road works (especially painful when the sledgehammer guy misses my car only by a few inches while taking his backswing).
During the refurbishment process, and anomaly has been detected. One day the contractor asked us to come into the room and knock at one of the walls. The bedroom is not in the main building, but in an annexe (so there is an attic over it and not the next floor). We had not paid to much attention to the fact that it was the only room in the flat in which we were able to actually head the neighbours. In any other room we could play foosball or Guitar Hero till 4 a.m. and nobody ever complained. One day I asked (attention!) my neighbour C. (the one behind the anomaly wall) about the sound permeability. He said they were not able to hear anything from our flat. Imagine my shock when the wall we knocked on emitted a dull sound, and when we removed the plaster, we saw… a DOOR. A door like those installed in blocks of flats from the 70s: you kick it hard, it’s gone. This time though there was no need to kick it, as the only thing that kept it closed was (the relief!) a STAPLE at our side. When we removed the staple and opened the door (which my neighbour Z was brave enough to do), the door hit a wardrobe in neighbour C’s flat.
Just like that.
Up to this day I am unable to grasp what made neighbour C. claim that he had no idea how the sounds from his daugters’ piano playing reached our ears. Those poor girls – I have no idea how long in their adult lives will they have to pay for having only a cardboard door separate them from a newly-wed couple. The best bet I can make is that C did now want to participate in the (considerable, truly) costs of bricking up the door. We finally did it by ourselves and I still wish I had let that eczematous hamster into his flat before adding the last brick.
Unfortunately, this event had sunk into oblivion (in my more and more Alzheimer-like memory), and that proved to be a very disadvantageous fact.
Then, a few days ago, one Thursday afternoon, after a short meeting concerning the current matters of the cooperative, neighbour C. told me that he had a private matter to discuss with me. He said he was setting up a new bathroom in his flat and wanted to plug the outlet (one big WC pipe and 4 smaller ones) to a master pipe in my cellar. One more thing to explain here: my cellar is a big one, with 80m2 and an interesting layout which you can admire in the enclosed drawing. At this point it is in a less-then-raw state (dirt floor) but in future I want to use it, e.g. transforming it into an office – a fact the above mentioned neighbour is well aware of (“But you’re not going to turn it into a pub, are you?”). Unfortunately, the cellar is not exactly below my flat, so I cannot connect to it easily from here. Over rooms 1 and 2 there is a grocery store, over 3, 4 and 5 neighbour C. has his annexe.

My cellar. Full of potential, but I would have to invest a lot, and get rid of the pipe first. No proportions have been kept.
I answered that in general I do not want to block the new bathroom possibility for him, but he would have to break through the ceiling in the last room (5 in the drawing) and the closest possible to the wall, I would also like for him to join the 5 pipes into one at the level of his flat. I said I would think about it and answer in a few days. On Friday Mr. C. (who actually calls himself MISTER C in many notes) stopped my husband with the same question, but he said he would not give him any permits without talking to me first.
Saturday morning I wrote a long email to my neighbour C., carefully setting up my proposals for futher negotiation:
- digging the pipe into the ground (there is no real floor in the cellar),
- hiding it in the wall, if it sticks out from the ceiling somewhere else than the very end of room 5,
- buying the last part of the cellar by neigbour C. (this seems to be impossible in Polish law, though).
A little bit later, still on Saturday morning, I learnt that C. has already installed the pipe in my cellar.

So, where do we put your desk? The foreing body in my cellar. Do not miss the artwork in the background.
Sure – I am the only one to blame for not having fixed the padlock that a burglar (hoping to steal a cherry compote I assume) broke during one of the attempts. The padlock does close, but you can open it without using a proper key. Neighbour C. entered the cellar, drilled through the ceiling in room 3, and then run the pipe through rooms 3, 4, and 5, plugging it into the master pipe in room 5. Wanting to save on the materials, he made shortcuts in all the corners (pay attention to the backgroun on the beatiful photograph).
To understand the situation well, here are the facts:
- My neighbour C. could as well have had the pipe run through his own flat and break through to the cellar at the very end, but this way he would have had to drill through a number of walls in his own flat and somehow mask the pipe and the sounds it emits.
- Neighbour C. has at least one functional bathroom in his flat already.
- Neighbour C. was well aware that he was not given any permit to enter the cellar or install anything in it, not to mention drilling holes in the internal walls.
- There is not doubt whatsoever that the cellar belongs to my flat.
- Neighbour C. had been to the cellar and knows that the height of the rooms excludes the possibility to install a suspended ceiling or anything like it.
- Neighbour C. is not a dosser who had been denied the right to education and interaction with culture. He is an intellectual worker, a husband, and father of two daugthers.
When asked what the hell did he think, he called the situation an “unfortunate turn of events” (=his construction workers happened to have time on their hands). He proclaimed that he was “not at all proud of himself and in no way did he consider himself a winner”. He said he had waited for an SMS with our decision, but did not get it (well, I see no unanswered calls in my phone, something you would expect from a person who is desperately trying to get to know your decision). He also expressed the will to “work out a compromise” during a BBQ he invited us over. Just to set things straight, I am not accustomed to have BBQs with him not only because I do not eat meat, but mostly because never ever had he invited me or my husband to hang out. I am also truly puzzled by his understanding of the word compromise. So, when we finally meet (a moment after my lawyer sends him the documents with a recorded delivery letter), I am going to propose him a deal. I will put a huge garbage bin in his living room and then, working out a compromise, I will change it to a smaller one, that is going to stay there forever – just like Mr. C likes compromises to be done.
There is a number of daunting features this moralless story haunts me with. First: he broke into my property, and the property law is one of the few areas of law there are still treated seriously here. Second: he has pulled a really awful stunt on a kind, well-mannered neighbour (me) in a very small housing cooperative. Third, and most enraging: this is not the first time in my life when I see people confusing politeness with weakness. He really assumed that he would get away with this, that I would not have the strength (or time, maybe?) to react. I learned a long time ago that there exists a group of people who require a loutish attitude, who need to be yelled at, because otherwise they are unable to receive the message. This is not my weapon of choice, but more and more I am thinking it should be. Also, I would have agreed for him to put the pipe there, just in a way that did not deteriorate the value of the place… At this point there is nothing to discuss anymore.
If you think this story sound crazy and improbable, here is the opinion of my editor B. after I explained why I am late with this week’s bundle:
The situtation is so absurd that is must be true.


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