Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2005-01-26 04:13 am
azurelunatic) wrote2005-01-26 04:13 am
Don't Drink the Water
Today at work, I was suddenly struck by my lack of a reliable regular local news source. The ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
bbcnewsworld feed does very well at keeping me informed about world events. But I don't have very many local friends, and those I do have either don't post very much, or live in a similar cave.
This was brought to my attention when one of the people in the area that I was walking asked me if the water at work was safe to drink. I checked with Pink Shirt Guy to see what this was all about, and learned that Phoenix is having some issues with water, and stuff might start growing in the slightly grungy tapwater. I hadn't known that there were tapwater problems until I got to work, and the fact that I hadn't known disturbed me more than the thought that I could catch some dread disease from brushing my teeth if nasty little buggies take advantage of the extra dirt. (I drink Phoenix tapwater; it's not really something I'm afraid of, because I have the sort of immune system that can take certain things, and there are things that you have to do to maintain this.) What if it had been something more crucial that I'd missed? What if I'd been ill already, or elderly, or young, or had someone like that in the household?
The water was a theme at work. The same guy kept asking questions about the water that I wasn't able to answer, so I was running back and forth to the Pink Shirt Guy about it. There was a sign on the coffee machine in the supervisors' break room; evidently that uses tap water. The specifically-for-drinking water in the workplace is industrially filtered, and therefore safe.
After the shift ended, Pink Shirt Guy had looked up some of the possible things that might start growing in the water. He started listing off a few, and since he didn't remember all of them, he started adding in preposterous things, culminating in something that may have involved monkey butts or aardvarks. "Giardia?" I asked, from off where I was fishing random paper clips out of the plastic pockets in the interviewing booths.
"Probably," he said from where he was sitting behind his desk in the administrative area at the center of the room.
"Also known as Beaver Fever," I added for good measure.
"I'd be ashamed to go to the doctor and say I had Beaver Fever," he observed.
"It would probably make it worse if I were to say, 'get your mind out of the gutter, it's the kind of beaver that chews wood'," I smirked.
Since he'd been in the bullpen and I'd been off to one side of the room, out of direct line of sight, we'd been carrying out the conversation in theatre voices. (Not an inside voice by the elementary school definition, not an outside voice, but meant to carry over a furnished room.) Everyone else demonstrated that they'd been listening by stopping the side conversations and making appropriate noises.
"I was referring to the rhyming aspect of the disease," the Pink Shirt Guy said with amazing dignity under the circumstances. Yeah. Rhyming. Yeah.
After I got home, I wound up setting up and subscribing toindymedia_azphx and indymedia_az. The signal-to-noise ratio is probably going to be skewed towards the noise vs. a Large Corporate Media Feed, but that was the most interesting, reliable, and local source of news I could think of. Relevance is everything.
bbcnewsworld feed does very well at keeping me informed about world events. But I don't have very many local friends, and those I do have either don't post very much, or live in a similar cave. This was brought to my attention when one of the people in the area that I was walking asked me if the water at work was safe to drink. I checked with Pink Shirt Guy to see what this was all about, and learned that Phoenix is having some issues with water, and stuff might start growing in the slightly grungy tapwater. I hadn't known that there were tapwater problems until I got to work, and the fact that I hadn't known disturbed me more than the thought that I could catch some dread disease from brushing my teeth if nasty little buggies take advantage of the extra dirt. (I drink Phoenix tapwater; it's not really something I'm afraid of, because I have the sort of immune system that can take certain things, and there are things that you have to do to maintain this.) What if it had been something more crucial that I'd missed? What if I'd been ill already, or elderly, or young, or had someone like that in the household?
The water was a theme at work. The same guy kept asking questions about the water that I wasn't able to answer, so I was running back and forth to the Pink Shirt Guy about it. There was a sign on the coffee machine in the supervisors' break room; evidently that uses tap water. The specifically-for-drinking water in the workplace is industrially filtered, and therefore safe.
After the shift ended, Pink Shirt Guy had looked up some of the possible things that might start growing in the water. He started listing off a few, and since he didn't remember all of them, he started adding in preposterous things, culminating in something that may have involved monkey butts or aardvarks. "Giardia?" I asked, from off where I was fishing random paper clips out of the plastic pockets in the interviewing booths.
"Probably," he said from where he was sitting behind his desk in the administrative area at the center of the room.
"Also known as Beaver Fever," I added for good measure.
"I'd be ashamed to go to the doctor and say I had Beaver Fever," he observed.
"It would probably make it worse if I were to say, 'get your mind out of the gutter, it's the kind of beaver that chews wood'," I smirked.
Since he'd been in the bullpen and I'd been off to one side of the room, out of direct line of sight, we'd been carrying out the conversation in theatre voices. (Not an inside voice by the elementary school definition, not an outside voice, but meant to carry over a furnished room.) Everyone else demonstrated that they'd been listening by stopping the side conversations and making appropriate noises.
"I was referring to the rhyming aspect of the disease," the Pink Shirt Guy said with amazing dignity under the circumstances. Yeah. Rhyming. Yeah.
After I got home, I wound up setting up and subscribing to
indymedia_azphx and indymedia_az. The signal-to-noise ratio is probably going to be skewed towards the noise vs. a Large Corporate Media Feed, but that was the most interesting, reliable, and local source of news I could think of. Relevance is everything.
And don't breathe the air
Time was when an American about to go abroad would be warned by his friends or the guidebooks not to drink the water. But times have changed and now a foreigner coming to this country might be offered the following advice.
Re: And don't breathe the air
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Feeds aside, my best souce of local news has been azcentral.com. It's got a few annoying ads now and again, but it's been a better source than most. Even than the local news stations, which are generally useful for weather, traffic reports, and accident reports, and that's about it. I knew about the water thing yesterday morning. But the breakdown yesterday was thus: 100x more particles in the water than usually allowed, making the environment potentially ripe to grow other things. The allowed particles is 1 particle per billion. The count yesterday was 2.1 particles per billion. I wonder how you can have .1 of a particle. ;) I'm still waiting for the stupid news conference from city hall to break in on my soap watching...
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AZcentral.com annoys me.
I drink the tap water here because it's water, I can't afford purified water in the amounts of water that I drink (especially because I have to refill my 64oz mug a few times a day), and I grew up in close proximity to neighborhoods where the well water, while safe to drink, had enough iron in it to taste like blood.
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How does azcentral.com annoy you? Honestly, I'm just curious. :) I've found occasional annoying as hell ads on there when clicking through articles, but it's otherwse mediocre editing is typical of the publishing industry as a whole these days. Lazy bastards love their spell checkers. Bah.
Water: I suppose if the water you grew up with tasted worse, Phoenix water isn't so bad afterall. *smirk* I've always been used to better water, and Phoenix's tastes about a bad as what I remember of Los Angeles water. Which was pretty gross. So these days, we get our water out of the Crystal Gyser rev. osmosis machines that are parked outside many Walgreens here (we used them in Texas too. They give good tasting water. :). 25 cents a gallon. I go oooooog at those people who pay through the nose for arrowhead, daisani, etc. We go through about 5 gallons a week. Unfortunatly, it'd take a few years for our own rev. o system to pay for itself if we bought one. *boo*
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And since I had been working in a call center, I get even more irate when other call centers are Bad Little Fayoumi.
I go through water at, hmm, about a gallon and a half a day all on my lonesome. And since I don't actually have a car of my own per se (I'm carsitting this month, and before that I was borrowing my soon-to-be-former roommate's car when it wasn't in use), transporting water in bulk is problematical.
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