Daily Dose of English 204
Maintenance
Daily Dose of English 204
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you are listening to a daily dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelive.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about maintenance, a word that I had to look up how to spell because I am not a very good speller in English. I don't know if you've noticed this in other things that I've recorded, but I frequently have to like think about my spelling. It is not easy. So if you're struggling with English spelling, me too, me too. Don't worry about it. If you can read it, that's all that really matters. So, maintenance is an important thing to do. And I'm especially realizing that as a lot of things in my apartment are slowly deteriorating, they're getting worse and worse over time. And thankfully, I'm renting the apartment and so it's not my problem, which is great about renting. So I just actually this Monday, a couple of days ago, geez, it's Friday, so a week ago, basically, the landlord came over, the landlady, if you will, and she brought a contractor and we sort of talked about the different problems in the apartment. And And the guy was like, yeah, this is all just pretty standard maintenance stuff, right? And so I figured we'd talk about some maintenance, why it's important, what things that I might be neglecting to maintain, and give you a bit of a reminder that you should do a little bit of maintenance on your things. Also, just even just a little bit on your living space can go a long way, because once it gets too far, well, no, let me rephrase that. If you don't do maintenance, it can get exponentially worse and more difficult to repair. And so like an example is cleaning. If you don't clean something ever, that one time you do clean it is going to be way, way, way worse than if you just cleaned it more regularly. And so a lot of people recommend you do regular cleaning on certain things like every three or four months or whatever. So you just do it like three or four times a year, which is not very often, but that can go a really long way. So drains are a good one. Drains are often neglected. and they can get pretty dirty and then one day it starts to back up and smells terrible and you're like oh shoot i should have been doing this more regularly that happened actually at that first apartment that i went to that i mentioned in last episode in the last episode and My dad was very nice. My parents came to visit like a week or two after I'd moved in because they wanted to see where I was living and whatnot. And my dad basically offered to clean the drains, which was amazing. I did not want to do that. He didn't even have to do that. It wasn't his job, but he did it. They were disgusting. It looked like they had never been cleaned, like ever. And so definitely if somebody will do dirty maintenance like that for you, that is awesome. So I will not complain that he helped out with that because it was gross. But I do some maintenance here. I'm in a new apartment now with actually thankfully better drains. They're a little more modern, but I do a little bit of maintenance on them to clean them out. However, sometimes things do get backed up further than I can necessarily handle. And so that's actually one of the problems that they're going to address, is that the drain in one of my showers, which this pretty small, it's not a huge apartment, but it has two showers, which is kind of a lot. And the nicer shower, like technically, I don't really like to use because it's like connected to my office. And so I use another shower and it has a couple of problems. One of them is that like further down in the drain, it's just, it needs to be cleaned out and maintained. And so that's one of the things they're going to do, thankfully. Yeah, I tried to clean it out on my own. It didn't work. It didn't help, sadly. I wish it did because it's kind of annoying to shower and have the water accumulate at my feet. But yeah. That shower also was built poorly, which probably doesn't help. There was this leveling issue, and so the floor is slightly unlevel. And so the water doesn't quite all drain anyways, and it leaves little puddles. which is actually, it's not very much water, but it does stain the floor. And so when you look at the floor, like, yeah, there's big spots of basically minerals on the floor, which you can't clean. It's just so stained on there. But that was a mistake of the original contractor who didn't do it very well. Not my fault, not my fault. Some other things that definitely need maintenance here are last week I mentioned, yesterday I mentioned this light that I love that is having some electrical issues or whatever and it is not staying on and it's like burning out the lights really, really quickly and one of the sides doesn't work and I'm really hoping that they fix that. um soon sadly the the guy can't like come to do all the work for at least like i think 10 days which is dumb so i have to wait around um but yeah they're gonna hopefully fix that there's also like the the stove and the oven there's like it they're all gas here in mexico which needs to be updated that's uh but that's just how the country is it's pretty much all gas everywhere But they need some cleaning, basically. The gas doesn't come out as much of the little places where gas comes out. I don't know what that's called. So that needs to be cleaned. That takes like some special maintenance tools and stuff. There's a bunch of little things like that, some shelves that are slightly slouching and whatnot. If you can do a little bit of maintenance on your things especially, which I'm going to talk about now, definitely do it. For me, the main thing is my computer. because I have a desktop computer which is mostly air on the inside and so I need to clean it out because if you don't clean out your computer or even like your game consoles or any other electronics like that that have like a fan intake then they can get pretty dirty and actually it can affect performance. Often not that badly, but if you're like a smoker or you have other things in your home or whatever, it's very possible that those things get quite dirty and cease to function as well. So, plus it also is just nice because when you do eventually like go clean something or want to replace something, you don't really want to have to clean off three years of dirt. For cleaning a computer, it's actually relatively simple. You can get some compressed air and just spray it, basically just spray it in there. You do want to be careful, right? You should turn it off, unplug it, and just make sure that you're not going to break anything. You can also use isopropyl alcohol to clean off more specific things, although your computer probably doesn't really need that if it's functioning. If there's stains and stuff, that's also something you can clean off with isopropyl alcohol or also called rubbing alcohol in the US. Sticker residue also is nice to clean off like that. It's also good just to, another kind of maintenance of cleaning is dusting. If you don't dust super often in your place or you have hard to reach spaces or in lamps, you might wanna dust in there because just the more dust that accumulates somewhere, the more likely you are just to be breathing in lots and lots of dust, which usually is just unpleasant. So might as well clean a little bit. There's plenty of things that you should probably also be looking at in a place, but I don't do a ton of maintenance like that. The thing I do try to keep nice and maintained is the fridge and the kitchen because I know it's really easy for things to get dirty under things or in the back of the fridge or whatever. And this isn't like strictly maintenance, but it's more like cleaning. But especially if you have an older fridge, cleaning it out can kind of function as maintenance because there might be some pathways or whatever about how the liquid, the cold circulates in the fridge or whatever. And so your fridge might actually run better if it's cleaner. If it's a more modern fridge, you probably don't have to worry too much. They're pretty efficient. Well, sort of. Yeah, they're usually pretty efficient. What else might need some maintenance? You. You might definitely need some maintenance if you don't take care of your toenails or your fingernails or your whatever. You as a person could need some serious maintenance. I definitely recommend getting a pedicure, like a professional, get your toenails professionally cut at least like every six months. I don't do it very often at all, but every so often it is nice to have somebody who knows what they're doing basically just clean out your toes because there's little things that get up in there that are harder to clean out. It's not the easiest thing in the world and does help you make sure that you don't get hangnails, no not hangnails, ingrown toenails and that sort of thing. You might also want to give yourself some kind of massage or if you go to the gym a lot, making sure that you stretch and maintain your stretching and making sure that you're not going to injure yourself. You can also do a mental health day. It's definitely a reason to take a day off from work. One of our basic, we have essentially a company policy that mental health days can, or burnout days can function as sick days, right? If you have a day that you are, you're having a week that you just really can't work, you can't focus, it's really difficult. Take a day off. don't do anything, go walk around, come back refreshed and focused because if you're just at work for no reason, you're not really being very helpful. So take care of yourself, maintain yourself just as much as you do your apartment and your living space. But yeah, that's everything for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that you maybe learned a word or two. I think I said some kind of interesting ones in there. So yeah, let me know down in the comments if you enjoyed, but I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.
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