I know, I’m a broken record. But I’m still not sure you understand the woes. And more importantly, I hope I can read this some day and laugh at it rather than cry in my dirty clothes with dirty hair in my dirty house with dirty dishes in the sink.
Here’s the usual: Because of where we live in town, we only get water from the government for a few hours each day. We have a 1200 liter tank that the water goes into, usually sometime after midnight, once everyone else in town is filled up. We get the leftovers.
Some days, we don’t get water at all. Thankfully, we don’t usually use 1200 liters in a day, so we can get by for a couple days without water.
This is more complicated when: a) we bake bread and use loads of water; b) we do lots of laundry, either from sweating a lot or washing sheets or who knows what; anything over a load a day can cause problems; c) we host a dinner or anything requiring extra dishes; d) the kids leave on water outside or elsewhere and we fail to notice.
So, sometimes we run out of water. It used to be about once a year, and then sometime last year it became every few months. And then a water park opened up just up the road from us & thus up the line from us–they get water first–and we’ve since been running out more often. Many will claim it is not the water park, but as a resident, the week they opened we received no water for ten days straight. Coincidence? I think not. It has admittedly leveled out more, and we are only running out about once a month. Usually, if we can make it to the following night and refrain from the luxury of doing laundry for a few days, we are alright. Annoying, but workable.
This has been our goal: recognize that it is annoying, but make it workable.
This week, we ran out of water on Saturday night.
We went to bed, a bit sad but hopeful water would come in. Fail. We repeated this for four days.
In the meantime, not having water is a bit of a hassle. In case you haven’t noticed, water is very important to life.
To flush our toilet, we pumped in water from the well in our yard. It is brown water. Brown water that you cannot see through. So basically, you use the restroom and flush, and it sometimes gets grosser.
We are trying to use minimal dishes, which means we are eating out more. I’m kind of over it.
We haven’t done laundry in five days, and to be honest, I don’t have that many clothes. I’m out of workout clothes and re-wearing them.
We have been showering at our gym, to avoid bucket bathing with the brown water. But this means we only get one shower a day, after we swim our laps.
It also means that for the past two days I’ve killed huge cockroaches in the shower before I get in.
And today one crawled up my leg while I was showering.
I’m over it.
Today we decided to visit the water authority. We took our bill, which was paid, to show that we did in fact pay it. They looked at our bill and agreed we had paid it and it was not shut off. A water pipe broke.
So if we ran out of 1200 liters on Saturday, the latest possible time for this pipe breaking was Friday, and that assumes we used a whole lot of water on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday.
When will the water pipe be fixed? Two more days.
Okay, then we requested a free delivery of water to our house. They have huge delivery trucks and offer them for free if there are issues with water.
The woman handed us a number and told us to call to ask for the water truck. This seemed a bit silly for a few reasons: a) we were standing inside the water office, so who were we calling?; b) if we were calling the water truck, she could speak Thai and could read our address to them, which would be far easier than us mumbling gibberish over the phone.
Nonetheless, we went outside to call. Take one: they asked for our customer number, which we couldn’t find with all the Thai. So we went back inside to ask. She talked to them in Thai, and determined we had dialed the number wrong and called Nestle. Awesome.
Take two: we called again, with no answer.
We went back inside and explained that no one answered. She was convinced we had done it wrong and called again. The phone rang just down the desk from her: literally about 1 meter away.
See? It works, she said.
Yes, it rings. But no one answered. (As in, see how you didn’t answer it? Although why I’m calling you from outside is beyond me.)
Oh! You are trying to call us now? What do you want?
!?!?!?
We want a water delivery! Because your pipe broke and you didn’t fix it and we haven’t had water for a week! And because a cockroach crawled up my leg today and I’m over it!
Oh, okay. Tell me your address and I’ll ask them to make a delivery.
Uh, yep–here’s our address. Right on our bill that we showed you a few minutes ago. Yep, that’s our house.
PLEASE SEND WATER.
Oh, the water woes.