No Water and A Plethora of Porcelain

On a day when my thoughts should have been focused on the loss of future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols….my mind was instead looking for a more important item---

H20

You see, a water main broke because of some chilly temperatures and our home and the college were immediately water-less. It made for an interesting test of my ability to think on my feet. My filthy and smelly…unwashed….dry feet.

You always just expect when you open a tap, water will roll out. And when nature calls, you expect the toilet to wistfully sweep it away. That is until you face a water free life.

The first problem arose when I came home from Florida finding about four inches of snow on my beloved Chevy truck. When the water stopped flowing, Carol’s rural upbringing kicked into high gear.  She freaked when I started knocking snow off the hood of the truck. Made me go inside the house while she scraped the white stuff into a bucket and started boiling it on the stove.

“I’m not drinking that,” I protested.

She spat back: “You will be flushing it.”

Ahhhh, it started to soak in. Water into the toilet once again made it functional. Brilliant. Beautiful….and resourceful. I have always said I married above my pay grade.

When I awoke the next morning….still no water flowing in town….I decided I could use the electric razor and some liberal swipes with the deodorant…and skip off to work.  But what was I going to drink for coffee? 

So I rolled past the only supermarket in Snyder and saw shoppers carting out water by the bottle like they had stopped making it.  I sprung into action.

I got the last two gallons of spring water by outsprinting an 85-year-old man to the back of the store. He was old….but still gave me a race.  He might have won….but his hamstring popped near the Gatorade. It was tough luck. No coffee for you today, old fella.

Once at work, the problem was a little more dicey. No Carol. No more snow for the john.

A growing problem was becoming apparent around the campus in the many lavatories under my control. Some colleges brag about overall enrollment. I am pretty proud of our TTS ratio.  That’s the toilets-to-student ratio. We wax most other small colleges. We possess a plethora of porcelain. 

It only becomes a problem on days when we are water-less. I won’t bore you with the details of the problem. Needless to say…..we “handled” it when the water was restored.

There have been a couple of more scares as the city struggles to keep up with other breaks in the water line.  It means you wash dishes immediately upon using them….you wash all towels pronto….and you refrain from sampling the chili at the lunchroom.

I had a Facebook friend say she continually checked her shower to determine when it was working so she could jump in quickly to wash her hair.

I responded.:

“My hair needs a good washing……both of them.”