Paul's Comments

The title of this article usually refers to living in an area where local sales of alcoholic beverages are prohibited, or maybe even consumption might be illegal, I'm not sure because I don't drink. And for the moment, I can't. But not alcohol, water.

As I mentioned, the property I'm living in was foreclosed. The old landlord no longer owns the place and I don't know to whom it was transferred or what they're going to do about it. In the mean time, as I said before, until someone does something with papers I'm not leaving. But we had a water leak, which has caused some minor flooding. Well, since I can't expect anyone else to fix the problem, I called a plumber. I discover it's going to cost $450 or so to fix. Ouch. I can't afford that. (Beside that, it ain't my place.) So I have the plumber shut off the main water, and bleed the pipes. That costs $117. One way or another, I figure I'll get that back.

Because of the law, the new owner can't throw me out, he's going to have to either give me notice, then file an eviction if I don't leave, which I will fight, or pay me off to break my lease. But if the place has serious water damage the county might be able to declare the place uninhabitable and thus have me removed. This prevents that possibility. I even had the electricity changed over so that they can't turn off the power; if they do, then I've got grounds to sue for what, at a minimum, is wire fraud since they'd have to call PEPCO on the telephone to do so. They'd be discontinuing a valid account established by a tenant; conceivably they could legitimately discontinue the former landlord's account.

I knew it was going to be expensive. Just wasn't sure if it was unaffordable but was prepared if, as it turned out, it was. I mean, what I felt was, if it was expensive, I'd pay it. If it was really expensive, I'd cry (or want to) and pay it. If it was unaffordable, then I'd have no choice and I'd do what I did; shut off the water and bleed the faucets so that we don't get either water hammer nor does the water freeze up in the pipes since by draining the pipes there's no standing water.

I would have screamed and gone to $250 if I had to. So, for now, I will call a water delivery company and get a truckload of water. All I need is water for cooking, drinking, bathing out of a bucket, and the occasional flush away of waste. Delivered water is expensive, but for a hundred bucks, if I had to spend that much, you can imagine how much bottled water I could buy; probably enough to fill the living room of the place. Anyway, if I couldn't have afforded that, I would have gone and bought some sort of storage system like a big tank or something, (cubic meter buckets from Home Depot are about $6) and sealed water that way, then asked someone for water by filling a tank from a hose for that purpose. Bad came to worse I could always boil water before using. Or microwave it, which would probably do the same thing.

In the mean time I'll just use delivered water. I can get a water cooler which does hot and cold water for $13 a month, and something like $10 a bottle. If I really was going to get a lot of water, I'd have gotten someone to help me and I'd have picked up a truckload of water from Shoppers Food Warehouse or maybe Safeway. For the short period I'm probably going to need to do this I'll pay the extra price for delivered water; I need it now and don't have the capacity to make other choices. This seems to be a reoccurring problem when you're stuck in a wheelchair.

Deer Park will be delivering on Friday.

Some good news, I used the corporation that I am sole director and officer to order the water, and guess what: I get a business discount! The Water Cooler is $10 a month and the bottles are less. So I ordered more bottles. (I'm figuring to have enough water around to last the better part of a month.) The only big part of the expense is the deposit on the bottles. I figure the difference alone on this one transaction saves me the $25 a year it costs to keep the corporation's charter active. Turns out it was a good idea to set one up four years ago even if I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I should have been doing this with anything I ordered where there was a possibility of recurring orders. Would have saved me on some problems. I think I need to find out about opening a corporate checking account, if I can find a bank that won't be too gouging on fees. I just hate paying $10 a month or more to put money away.

I pointed out to the clerk that charging a deposit on the bottle makes sense, and if dairies did the same thing as water companies there would be no need to have laws against stealing milk cartons. When they deliver water, they charge you for what the bottle costs. When you return the bottle, you get the deposit back. You basically own the bottle, and if you decide to convert it over to something else (like using it to store change), well, you bought it, so it's no loss to the water company.

If dairies billed stores a deposit fee, say $15 or $20 each, fully refunded on return, the stores would be careful to return the crates, or in the alternative, if someone kept it, the dairy would get a $20 deposit on a milk carton that probably costs them $3 in quantity to be produced.