Emotional Delay

# Summon Help, Trap Everyone At 9:07 a.m., a burst pipe turns the eleventh-floor corridor into a shallow river, while a harassed plumber in orange overalls plants his tool case in the Gracia lobby and announces that every stair he climbs costs extra. The building chairwoman herds residents into the lift two at a time, but it refuses every rehearsed compliment, every weather observation, and one passionate agreement that olives are “basically fruit.” With forty neighbours carrying thirty-nine feuds, the only person universally acceptable is the fourth-floor resident responsible for all of them, who has barricaded himself behind a door marked with a brass pineapple. The plumber begins dragging his pipe wrench toward the stairs, and the chairwoman must either put the hated man in the lift or personally carry a dripping washing machine hose up eleven floors before 10:00.