You know how you do a search on your computer or your phone, and the next thing you know an advertisement related to that search shows up on Facebook? Or worse, it seems as if even talking about a product brings up such an ad? I have a new twist on that problem, and I say the situation has gotten out of hand.
This morning I wrote a new blog post, which I have saved for another day. It contains the following line:
We absolutely drink tap water when we can, but we also keep bottles of water in the closet in case a hurricane (or anything else) threatens our water supply.
In point of fact, no hurricane has yet cut our water supply, though we take that threat seriously, in the same way we take the possibility of fire seriously and have smoke alarms installed. But the worst that has happened with our water was to have had it cut off for an hour or two for maintenance, which has only happened a couple of times, and for which we were always warned ahead of time.
After a lovely morning with a friend at our local botanical gardens, followed by a delicious lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, we came home to no water. When our local government wanted to tell us where we could pick up sandbags if needed (we've been getting a LOT of rain), we got phone calls to all three phones, text messages to two phones, and e-mails to two separate accounts. I think we even got alert messages on our phones. But for this, nothing.
In a reminder of why it can be good to hang on to my Facebook account, that's where we found the information that much of the neighborhood was also without water, that the city had no idea when it would be back on, and that we'd probably be faced with a boil water directive when it was.
Shortly after 3:00, the water was back on. We never heard anything about a need to boil our water, but we did hear (again, via Facebook) that the workers were taking steps to make sure the lines were clear and that wouldn't be necessary. So all's well that ends well.
But I'll admit it was a shock, and a bit of a wake-up call. I'm quite certain that in the 40 years we have been here, this is the first time we have had our water supply halted without warning. The fact that I had just written about its reliability just added a little freakiness to the surprise.
As the Boy Scouts always told us, Be prepared.
