I imagine he only asked so that in court he could say that he asked only for you to become combative, that’s proving that you were responsible for the issue not getting fixed.
“The how water is not working” is just bad phrasing. “There’s no hot water” describes the problem better. Boiler issue. Burners go out. Boilers go bad every 5 years. Owning a house is becoming a burden. Shit like that.
For a small landlord: some kind of hack taught at a “get rich quick” slumlording class. Something to add friction to the exchange, so the problem either fixes itself or the tenant forgets/misses a message.
For a big corpo landlord: probably complying with some really stupid corpo policy surrounding “objective evidence” in a “not my job” kind of way.
None of y’all are plumbers and most of y’all work in IT and it fucking shows.
This is not a case where a photo is required or even all that helpful.
A photo shows that water is running. Is it hot, is it cold, is it lukewarm? Who knows?? Certainly not the landlord.
Probing questions sure would have been helpful. Like is the water lukewarm or cold?
If it’s either it doesn’t matter, the heater is not working and a plumber is required.
Now what if the water isn’t running? Well then the response would indicate that.
“No there’s no water at all when I turn on the hot water.”
Ok that’s an entirely different problem, could be the heater, could be someone turned a valve off.
But even that much information isn’t all that important because no matter what the problem is, or where it’s located, the tenant will not be able to resolve this issue, a plumber is required. They’ll need access to the premises, because water heaters are generally inside the unit, which means the tenant will likely need to be present when the plumber shows up.
The plumber is absolutely not going to show up with a water heater based on what information he can get out of a text. He’s going to come in, and investigate the issue. Sometimes it’s a quick fix, sometimes it’s a problem. Generally the tenant is going to have absolutely no way of resolving it themselves, and generally a landlord wouldn’t want them to.
This is not an IT ticket, it’s a "call a fucking plumber my shits broken " ticket.
None of y’all are plumbers and most of y’all work in IT and it fucking shows
You’re not a plumber and you lack problem fixing skills and it fucking shows. 🙄
The photo shows:
water is running, meaning: the faucet works, the pipe to the faucet works, the water is not shut off
the faucet seems to be of a two valve kind, meaning: if the tenant is not an idiot and didn’t turn on the wrong valve, and they did wait a reasonable time for hot water to come out, then the problem is not with the faucet but with the heater
the faucet can not be the problem, meaning a plumber does not need to carry a spare faucet, but the pipes could be hooked up wrong (hot pipe to cold valve and vice versa), which could be and easy fox for the landlord themselves without having to pay a plumber
Probing questions would be only useful if the tenant spent some effort on answering them, instead of, for example:
is the water lukewarm or cold?
A: Yes.
what if the water isn’t running?
A: There is no hot water.
This is not an IT ticket, it’s a general problem solving procedure issue.
“the hot water isn’t working” could be understood to mean “the water in the hot water tap is not hot”, but it could also be understood to mean “the water is not flowing out of the hot water tap”.
The picture helps clarify the original statement. OP, this interaction is not nearly as bizarre as you make it out to be. It’s pretty typical of virtually all support requests. It’s incredibly common, when asking for support, that the requester assumes information is obvious when it is in fact not.
Yep. During my very short (6 mos) stint as a tech support rep for Dell, I’ve learned to assume your customer is an idiot. Even when they’re using techie terms or jargon (and at times more so). Never assume other things besides that or you’ll probably regret it.
You have to be very clear and precise. A single misunderstanding can take a simple problem a lot of time to get fixed.
It’s still kind of a weird way to request that information. They could have just upfront asked “is the hot water tap not working at all, or is it just not hot?”.
Having worked in IT I can tell you that often asking for specifics (even simple ones like what you said) will just get you a reply of “I don’t know it’s just broken. Fix it.” If you even get a response at all. Asking for a screenshot (or a picture in this case) is an action that you are requiring the user to take and is much more likely to at least get a response even if the response isn’t always helpful.
If the landlord had just asked for clarification I wouldn’t be surprised if they just got a response of “It just doesn’t work.” Which is far less helpful than even that picture.
While I agree with everything you wrote, this conversation is far from a typical support request. Both sides are fucking idiots without any common sense.
Not sure what you’re talking about. Hot and cold water definitely use different pipes. I’m not even sure how that would work with one pipe unless you were mixing right at the water heater or something.
The faucet tends to have some sort of control apparatus (maybe a “valve”, sometimes festooned by a “knob”) to enable the user to interactively choose the amount of water from each pipe that goes into the faucet.
Now, such apparatus might be comprised of two valves, each one for hot and cold water separately, or a single control which may be rotated to select the mixture amount, or an automaic thermostatic apparatus with a target water temperature dial that the operating user may set to a target temperature which may be called “hot” or “cold” and will adjust the water mixture from the hot and cold water pipes accordingly.
OP’s picture seems to have been sent in bad faith, but it does include a control apparatus comprised of a valve with a knob, which can be construed as the tenant showing they had done their due diligence in discovering it is by turning the pertaining knob to open the hot water pipe valve, and nothing else, that after a reasonable waiting period, the water coming out of the faucet is indeed still cold and not hot as intended by the expected behavior of the installed mechanism.
If the tenant misled the landlord by showing a tap which had only a single cold water pipe connection, or failed to correctly operate the valves connected to the faucet in order to produce the desired hot water, then the landlord could fairly charge them with any delays or extra charges incurred from being provided with false information, like the cost of sending a plumber to check on the heater… instead of a dog with a stick to bonk the tenant for being an idiot and not turning the right valve to the faucet.
“the hot water isn’t working” could be understood to mean “the hot water refuses to go out and get a job”, but it could also be understood to mean “the hot water is just sitting around in it’s boxers all day drinking beer”.
It reminds me of a client at a former workplace. The client says, the popup window doesn’t open, and sends a screenshot showing the underlying window with the popup window not being there.
“What” and “how” are fairly basic questions when being presented with a problem for the first time. I feel like OP was kind of being a jerk when he sent the photo.
Digital photo cameras often actually filter out infrared. But even if they wouldn’t it probably would be hard to tell if something is warmer than the surrounding by looking at a photo or video. What you need is a specific device that is calibrated for a specific spectrum of infrared, such as a thermographic camera.
I think there was actually at least one smartphone that had a thermographic camera installed, but that’s a very specific use case for e.g. construction work.
It could also be the landlord meant a photo of the water heater / boiler / whatever they use to get hot water. But he should have been more explicit. Most of these devices have a light or a display that indicates if there’s a problem and what the problem is, so the landlord can take appropriate action.
This is a common issue in tech support, not realizing what the other person doesn’t know. You don’t want to treat the person like a small child and tell them what to do. But on the other hand if you make assumptions about what they know how to do and they don’t, it can cause a lot of miscommunications.
It’s really a everyone sucks here situation. Sending a picture of the water obviously isn’t helpful, a simple response could have been: “Alright I’ll take pictures, can you specify what exactly I need to take pictures off and where to find that”. Then again the landlord just saying need pictures isn’t really helpful either.
Sometimes asking for a picture is just the easiest way, instead of going back and forth describing something in words, especially if it requires technical detail or nuance Remember, not all tents and landlords have 100% mastery of the language.
Neither are dumb. Just limited by assumptions and possibly jaded by past, frustrating experiences.
But you don’t go to a doctor and say “I’m broke, fix me”.
There’s a basic expectation that the patient/tenant will describe why its not broken. What is expected, and what’s it doing instead. (sometimes that needs to be reiterated back to the patient/tenant in order to move, and that’s where the landlord failed here.)
It boils down to experience with diagnosing that kind of problem when reported by a common person.
The amateur landlord so common in our age isn’t going to have that experience and unless they work in an area where it’s common to have to diagnose and fix technical problems they’re not going to be used to the kind of sistematic step by step approach used to pin down the exact nature of a problem so will have trouble even improvising it effectivelly.
Too bad this isn’t tech support and it’s the landlords job to show up and troubleshoot it himself. The tenant bears no responsibility here besides informing the landlord there is a problem.
They’re not responsible for fixing the problem, but they are responsible for ensuring that the problem is fixed, since until it’s fixed the don’t have hot water.
In this case ensuring that the problem is fixed most importantly entails telling the person who has to do the fixing as much about the problem as possible.
If you need help with something, you have to help your helper if you want it to be effective.
See, you may laugh but the landlord now knows that the water is still flowing, so the cause isn't an area-wide outage or a burst pipe, but instead there's a fault in the system that heats the water.
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