It's a Chinese Miracle

I have never been so happy to be so wrong. I thought it would take at least a month to fix my water heater. I thought that the whole machine was fried and that they would have to replace it. I thought that the school would spend its time making empty promises to me while I took cold showers. But I am thrilled to say that I was wrong, enormously wrong. Yesterday David, the foreign affairs guy, told me that a repairman would stop by my apartment between 1 and 3 to take a look at the heater. At 1, which was the first positive surprise, he arrived. I showed him the place where the wall socket and plug were burned black from an electrical surge and he started looking at the machine itself. Of course he didn't speak any English so this was all accomplished through a lot of hand signs and simple Chinese words. The first good thing I noticed was that the plug that was burned black actually didn't attach directly to the water heater. There was a surge protector that was hidden just out of view. He looked at the insides of the water heater for a few minutes before trying to ask me something. I didn't understand so he called David who translated, he wanted to know if I had a bike since he had to go buy some more parts. I didn't, I've been thinking about getting one but honestly the campus isn't that big and the subway is only a 15 minute walk. He grumbled and left to get some more parts. When he got back he shut off the power in the apartment and took the wall socket out to repair it. In the US this would have taken several people, one plumber to look at the water heater and an electrician to deal with the wall socket, but he clearly knew what he was doing with both. He replaced the wall socket with a new one, and bought a new surge protector. He fiddled around with the water heater too a little bit. In the end he told me to not turn the water heater on full power anymore, and to make sure to turn it off when I wasn't using it, before it didn't have an on/off switch but he put one in. So now I have hot water. The problem is, and in China there's always a problem, that the wire that connects the water heater to the wall is warm to the touch even with the water heater on half power. So it's fixed, but I might still die in an electrical fire. God only knows what exactly is wrong with the wiring that caused this whole problem in the first place. My apartment, of course, has no smoke detectors, so I'll have to go out and buy one to reduce the chance that I wake up one morning to the whole building burning down. They say every cloud has a silver lining, but in China I feel that every silver lining has a cloud.