Sunday, April 15, 2018

Water water

everywhere,
but not a drop that I wanted to drink.


Here, Reader Dear, is a little tale I'm going to tell on Ted.  (You know, the tenant with the "best ever" award whom I just described to you).

When he left his home of twenty years (the apartment that is now empty), his nephews brought a U-haul-type trailer and loaded up all the boxes and bins and bags of his possessions that he had so neatly packed.  They emptied the basement storage unit of most everything.

However, there were cases of water stacked along the walls.

"Shall we take those with us?" one of Ted's nephews offered.  "Or..."  He hesitated.

"Oh, just leave them,"  I said.  I knew their trailer was packed full and they were worn out from all the lifting and toting of Ted's furniture.
  
So the water sat in the otherwise empty storage unit for months while I dragged my feet on re-renting.  It's difficult to find good renters during the Christmas season.  And then came the snows of winter.  Eventually there came the departure of the renter with "worst ever" award and all that that entailed.  Now I had two apartments to fill.  I got busy and advertised.    















It was time to deal with the water!

It was only then that I pondered why Ted would want to have a total of twenty-five gallon jugs of water plus two cases of smaller water bottles.  Why would he stockpile water?


Dear Viewer, look at the date on this gallon of water and tell me that you recall a time when everyone was going a little crazy, thinking the world as we knew it was about to end!  Computers were all going to crash!  Everything was going to go haywire!  At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, there would be worldwide chaos!

It was Y2K!*

Ted had stockpiled water and held it for eighteen years!

It's true, Reader Dear. All the gallons were bottled in 1998 or 1999! 





Dear Reader, I chose a relatively warm and sunny day to deal with those bottles of vintage water.  I figured that water would never really "expire" but I had no wish to drink water that was stored in plastic for nearly two decades.  And I couldn't lift those cartons.

It took me forty-five minutes working non-stop to empty and crush the bottles.  It wasn't such a bad job, really; and, as I performed the task, I thought about Ted and was grateful he never had to break open his stash of life-giving liquid!  Happy for all the rest of us water-drinkers, as well!

************************
*The fear was that all of the computers that everyone depended on would malfunction. People also feared that our luxuries would be destroyed and that we would revert back to living like the olden days without any electricity, heat or running water. They called this the great Y2K scare. The scare consisted of the fear that the entire computer systems were going to fail on New Year's Eve 1999
--VPCalender.net

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am glad I can be anonymous with this confession...someone here was a ‘Ted’ and thought stocking up on all sorts of things would be the prudent thing to do...alas, my basement still shows evidence of that non-event. I guess you know this is your anonymous friend!

KTdid said...

Oh, dear Anony, I succumbed to that (now silly-sounding) Y2K fear, too! But I think as soon as the clock struck midnight I started depleting the stockpiles! :-)
Q.