Water, water everywhere & not a drop to drink

I was in the middle of fixing supper yesterday  (beef stroganoff in case anyone wants to know)  when the water went out.  It’s not unusual to have low water pressure in the summer months since we’re on a community well and our neighbors put a strain on it filling their swimming pools, but it’s rare that we’re completely out.  I dialed the help line, entered my zip code, and heard from the Ms. Automated Customer Service that they were aware of a water emergency in my neighborhood and that a technician had been dispatched and I could feel free to hang up.

So I did.

Four hours later, I was putting smelly boys to bed because the water still wasn’t on, so I called back, punched in my number, heard Ms. Automated Voice Lady say once again she was aware of an emergency in my neighborhood, but this time, I punched 0 enough times to get put through to a real live person who had no record of anything being wrong in my neighborhood and she would have a technician call me.

Which he did.

And he asked me if I had been shut off for non-payment of my water bill.

That would be a “no”.

Then he asked me to get a flashlight and go look at the meter at the street and the first words out of my mouth were “I have three boys.  Do you think I have a flashlight in this house that hasn’t been disassembled for parts?”

He had three kids, too.  He told me he’d call back in twenty minutes to give me time to find a bulb, the spring, housing, and salvage a few D batteries from the toy box collection of robots.

Flashlight in hand, I walked down the very dark driveway to the scary meter box that has creepy crawlies in it, but I knew that I had a serious problem when I sank in six inches of watery mud as I bent over to pick up the lid that was floating on top of the river that was flowing out of the box.

Broken water main.

Flowing since 4:30.

Nice.

Oh, and Mr. CPQ was out of town.

Nicer.

So I spent a couple of hours hanging out with Thomas from the water company at the end of the driveway and taking sneaky pictures as he dug up the yard because he inadvertently ended up breaking another part of the pipe in his attempt to fix the first part.

And we kept the neighbors awake with the rumble of the idling diesel truck and the flood lights that bathed their windows.

And Mr. CPQ got home after it was all over.

Have a nice day.