Water Meter Update

In an earlier posting I said the water department sent me a letter complaining because we used too much water, compared to our neighbors.

I found that hard to believe when I see Joe and his mother spraying each other with the water hose and also Joe washing his truck daily before his mother gets home and seeing all the mud on the truck, which was a way of saying he was spinning around and around in the back yard again.

And a couple of neighbors illegally waters their lawn every day. Our lawn is brown from lack of water.

Then, what topped it off was when I went behind the water meter man to look at the meter reading and when I lifted the lid the saw that the glass covering the numbers that rolls over was completely covered with mold, goo, and ants. No way they were reading my meter, so I called the water department and complained.

The meter reading is contracted out. They said they would send one of their men over to check things out.

A week and one day later the man came. He said he didn’t know how they read the meter, but it looks like they did an accurate job. He also said he cleaned the meter glass and sprayed the ants with WD40 – he said that was the best thing to get rid of the ants.

He said 8 days ago when the meter was read the last digit was on 4. Now, he said, it was on 5. The digit he was talking about only moves per 1000 gallons.

I said, “We used a 1000 gallons in a week and one day?”

He said probably not, maybe the hidden part was on 999 and just a couple of gallons and roll it over to the next number.

I told him of the letter I got from the water department. He, a plain spoken black man, said “don’t pay no attention to those letters – they don’t know anything (I’m not sure he used the word “anything”, it may have been more straight forward), they sent those letters out at random, and that way they look like they are doing their job trying to conserve water during this shortage.”

He also let me in on a little secret. Cobb County has plenty of water. He said Atlanta is hurting for water, Cobb County has so much water they sell water to the City of Atlanta.

I guess it pays to have the Chattahoochee River flow in your county.