Welcome to my Quarantine Diary, Week Number Eleventy-Kajillion and One. In this week's episode: I may have forgotten how to speak English, and life has no purpose. My cats, on the other hand, insist that I still have a primary purpose, and that's to feed them. Their impatient meows are the only thing keeping reality in check, and I suppose I should be grateful.
In the meantime, I continue to find ways to occupy my time. I've begun talking to the characters on TV, to my cats, and the other morning, I carried on a lengthy one-sided political discussion with my toaster. I'm pretty sure I've watched ALL of Netflix, listened to ALL of the music on all of the Earth, and yesterday I played The Sims and got incredibly jealous every time my little Sim people stood within 6 feet of one another. Then I sealed them all in separate rooms and yelled "SEE HOW IT FEELS?!" to my computer screen. It was strangely cathartic.
The good news is that my stimulus check arrived. The bad news is that it's gone already. It literally went down the drain.
We're supposed to use our stimulus checks to keep our needs met while keeping the local economy somewhat afloat. Well, I can attest that mine went to the local economy, alrighto. In fact, it went directly into the hands of the City of Rock Island.
A few weeks ago, I received my quarterly utility bill. I was a couple weeks away from a paycheck, so I put it in my Safe Place to Keep Important Stuff, otherwise known as the dusty pile of papers atop my bookshelf. Then, as we all know, the world basically pressed the pause button. Suddenly I wasn't waiting for my paycheck so much as I was waiting for my stimulus check. On the day of its heralded arrival, I dusted off the paperwork and set about paying bills. But when I opened my utility bill, instead of being greeted with the usual affordable total, I found myself staring at a dollar amount almost four figures deep. Say whaaaaat?
Now, I'll admit to some intense hand-washing over the past few weeks, but nothing that would result in a utility bill over four times the normal amount. I put on my best voice of indignation and called the city to inform them of their obvious clerical error.
"Umm, no," the friendly woman at the clerk's office responded. "Your water usage has spiked. Something's wrong."
Immediately my mind flashed back to when I bought my house. I have an outdoor water spigot with easy access for all the gardening and lawn care that I never do. Upon seeing this, my father INSISTED on putting a shut-off valve to the spigot in the basement. "Otherwise, your neighbors will steal your water!" Now, my folks live out in the boonies where neighborhood water thievery isn't much of an issue. But I was also pretty sure neighborhood water thievery isn't much of an issue in the heart of Rock Island, so I admit to not being too guarded about that shut-off valve.
But here it was, staring me in the face. Clearly someone had been stealing my water. I threw on shoes, gloves, a mask, a full Hazmat suit, doused myself in Lysol and headed out indignantly to see who was stealing my water so I could yell "J'accuse!" from 6 feet away. I spun the outdoor spigot, but nothing. The valve was working. The water was off.
I came back inside, furious and frustrated. And then I heard it. Underneath the roar of the TV, underneath the friendly hum of the air purifier, underneath the sound of the refrigerator and the air conditioner and the impatient meows of assorted cats, I heard it. The very subtle, very quiet hum of my toilet running. And running. And running. Uh oh.
Another thing my dad insisted on upon his first visit to my house was replacing my run-of-the-mill pauper toilet with the royalty of low-flows: a deluxe ultra-quiet behemoth fit for a king — or at least a king's wallet when it develops a leak. A simple internet search revealed the ugly truth: the toilet I have loved, trusted and sat upon for years is notorious for failure. Numerous Youtube videos demonstrate the problem.
As an evolved and knowledgeable journalist of some reknown, you'll have to forgive my complicated tech speak here. When you lift up the back of the toilet, there's a little doohicky that plugs the tank. When you flush, it raises that doohicky to dump the tank water into the bowl. And around that doohicky is a little plastic whatzit that seals the plug. It probably costs about 7 cents to make. And on MY particular model of toilet, this plastic whatzit can develop bubbles. As the bubble grows, it loses its seal and hundreds of dollars of water goes down the drain.
One Youtube video recommended I feel around the plastic whatzit for a bubble. I didn't have to feel. The bubble was sticking out of it like a thousand-dollar zit.
So you're welcome, Rock Island, for my undue yet somehow overdue stimulus. I now know the downside of getting a super-quiet toilet. I also know the downside of quarterly billing, and maybe Rock Island would be wise to alert its valued customers before three months pass when their water usage spikes. For the past week, I've had to turn off the water to my bathroom after every flush.
Thanks to essential workers risking their lives, a replacement whatzit is on its way to me now. People are hoarding everything from Lysol to hand sanitizer to meat. I'm going to start hoarding little plastic whatzits. In the meantime, I think my new strategy is to simply stop going to the bathroom. After all, I'm getting low on toilet paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment