My husband and I are having a problem with our neighbors. They don’t seem to be taking enough baths or showers. You can see how this would make living near them uncomfortable. We’re not even sure that they are washing their dishes or doing laundry.
How do we know this? Each month we get a bill from our public water utility informing us that we are using more water than our neighbors. Some months this certainly could be possible—but when we have been away for three weeks out of the month, that information is rather troubling.
Of course, there is an alternative to unhygienic neighbors. Maybe, this entire enterprise is bogus and simply trying to turn neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. My husband’s response whenever we get one of these notices is to turn on the tap. That might be his inner ten-year-old coming to the surface, but perhaps it isn’t. Maybe it is simply his revulsion for and rejection of our increasingly socialistic society’s attempt to sever links between citizens. He loathes attempts to make us compete with one another to win approval from the government and government approved entities.
When doctors request that parents leave the room and then ask children if their parents have guns in the house or teachers tell students that their parents’ beliefs are bigoted, we are in a dangerous place. When signs encourage us to turn in fellow drivers wrongly using the carpool lane and politicians stir up envy between citizens based on gender, color and income, our society suffers. The pace at which all this poison is being promoted is rapidly increasing. It is past time to stiffen our backbones —and rebel in ways more effective than leaving our faucets running.
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Laughter and crying are very close to each other.
I also agree that leaving faucets running and turning on all the lights is not the most effective response to this kind of corruption in business and government, and it only costs us more because we have to foot the bill for it. This post is funny but sad, with an eloquently stated (as usual) conclusion!
i’m going to show this to my husband. He has a kindred spirit!
Recall this strange event:
https://www.earthhour.org/celebrating-earth-hour – Celebrating Earth Hour
What is Earth Hour?
Earth Hour is a worldwide grassroots movement uniting people to protect the planet, and is organised by WWF. Engaging a massive mainstream community on a broad range of environmental issues, Earth Hour was famously started as a lights-off event in Sydney, Australia in 2007. Since then it has grown to engage more than 7000 cities and towns worldwide, and the one-hour event continues to remain the key driver of the now larger movement.
When does Earth Hour take place?
Earth Hour 2016 will be held on Saturday 19 March between 8.30PM and 9.30PM in your local time zone. The event is held worldwide towards the end of March annually, encouraging individuals, communities households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol for their commitment to the planet.
AND More ‘Earth Hour’ News out of the UK:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/features/what-earth-hour-2016-everything-7581816
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My husband’s response is always to turn ON ALL the lights in the house during Earth Hour to illuminate everything!
Susan, I was cracking-up today when I read your post because it made me think that both our husbands have similar responses to this sort of thing!
Exactly!
I receive electric utility usage report cards like this.They actually call themselves ‘report cards’. Ticked me off to no end when I first opened one. Then for a few months they caused me anxiety, wondering what they were telling me this for, what was the next step. I think the anxiety was the next step. Now I throw them away as soon as I can identify them.
The electric report card compares me to ‘my closest neighbors’,which they define in small print as being 100 people who live within a certain number of miles to me.
It’s so weird and worthless.
And it’s not so eco-friendly either, is it? I guess that only matters when certain authorities say it does.
Love that last sentence!
It’s that triple bottom line that all the hippest organizations are sporting these days. Its the whats what of the who’s who in corporate social responsibility that has been all the rave since the 90s. It’s just that the demarcations are just so darned elusive. Everyone is racing toward social and environmental bottom lines but nobody knows where they are, really. Apparently, it is some sort of illusion, delusion, or a convolution of both.
Bingo! They want to reduce us all to little Nimrodian bricks. They will tell us when to be born, when to breathe, what and how much to eat, and when to DIE. Remember the 1970’s movie Soylent Green? It was a Nimrodian horror.
Ha ha ha! Excellent point! Touche! Next it’ll be: ‘You consume more precious OXYGEN than your neighbors!’ For Pete’s sake!
That’s so funny. One of our daughters started whistling as an infant and my mother-in-law would laugh and say that to her.
There shouldn’t be legal restrictions. That’s the point. We should all choose and pay for the resources we want to use. I don’t want the government telling me how much of what I should have – like they insist I have medical coverage that I don’t want.
It’s an arbitrary resource. We don’t use our car one day a week because of the Sabbath but our neighbors don’t get notices telling them they use their cars more than we do.
Exactly! They are treating us like bricks not stones (a la Tower of Power CD) as if we should all be doing the same things.
Why is it an issue to the utility companies that you’re “using more water than” other residents in the same area?
So long as there isn’t currently a major drought occurring in your area or legal restrictions on amount of water usage per household why should anyone care about how much water you are using?
Sounds like Agenda 21 garbage. The Rabbi’s response sounds perfect to me! As a child, when my grandmother heard me whistle, she would say, “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad end.” Then we would both laugh and whistle some more!
Are you near that benighted metropolis where the urban government encouraged barbaric street riots so that a mob of ‘victims’ could express their emotions in mass? Filthy BIG government in overreach, I would say. Reducing the ‘water footprint’ is their genuflection to the new tin god of Global Warming?
We receive notices that we use more electricity than our neighbors. I should hope so, since they work full time away from home, and I work at home with my parents who are retired. I turn on more lights. Needless to say, I love your husbands response.
Our neighbors are actually wonderful and I doubt we have a leak. I do hope the non-literalness of what I was writing came across.
You may have a leak or a poor seal on the toilet flapper valve. I say this as once being the recipient of a rather large water bill one month after months of it incrementally increasing over several months.
Or you live in a socialist northeastern hellhole like I do.
In that case, yeah creepy water company and filthy neighbors. Ew.