At about 2 a.m. one cold winter’s night in 2003, I got up to get a drink of water. As I drank the water, I looked out my dining room window and noticed a tiny flame on the balcony, probably caused by a discarded butt from an upper floor. Despite a raging winter wind, the tiny flame clung to life as I pondered what to do. I would have stomped it out, except the door was barred shut, due to the fact that my balcony had been condemned as unsafe two years earlier and, thanks to a bizarre series of construction delays, was still months away from completion.

Eventually, I called the fire department. When I heard the sirens arrive, I went down to let them in. I couldn’t buzz them in from my unit, because my intercom was broken. Soon, half a dozen burly firefighters were staring out my window at the now metre-high flames feeding off the burlap-wrapped, scaffolding-encased concrete slab that someday, God willing, would once again be a balcony. One of them removed the slider panes from my dining room window and squeezed out. We formed a bucket brigade with my mixing bowls. It seemed strange that I led the brigade while several able firefighters stood around my kitchen chatting, but we got the job done. After they left, I couldn’t get the slider panes back into their slots, so I simply leaned them into the open space. I was due to have new windows installed within the next few weeks, so there was no point in having it fixed.

In fact, because of instalment delays, the new windows didn’t arrive for two more years, during which I lived with a loose, rattling dining room hole. I suppose I could have picked up the phone and complained to someone until it was repaired. But I was distracted by other problems—the water in my kitchen remained brown and odorous no matter how long I ran the tap, so I had to fill kettles and Brita jugs in the bathroom. My rads blasted heat year-round, until a record cold snap when they went suddenly, icily silent. In the laundry room, the machines ate money and spewed foam. In the underground garage, puddles festered and concrete rotted due to a blocked drainage pipe that hadn’t been cleaned in 45 years. When the boilers conked out, two repair companies refused to service them because of illegal modifications that meant they could blow at any minute. The steel rebars had rusted out and disappeared in the column holding up the southwest corner of our 10-storey building, leaving crumbling concrete to hold up one-quarter of the structure’s mass. The roof failed. The superintendent quit.

Besides, even if I did pick up the phone and call someone to complain, the person I would be calling was me. Somehow, in all the confusion, I had become Madame President of the building’s board of directors.