LEAKS AND JUSTIFICATIONS

Our house is not old, but it needs work.  It needs someone to take an 
active hand in the maintenance and alleviate the problems it suffers 
under.  That someone is me, certainly, but, suppose for a moment that it 
wasn't.  Suppose it was someone else's responsibility, and that that 
someone was as diligent about this as I am.  I still own the house, see, 
but someone else is responsible for it.  Just suppose.  It would be 
unacceptable.  The kitchen sink leaks; the bathroom sink leaks; the 
outside faucet leaks; the walls need patching and painting; the yard 
needs lots of work; the list is extensive and growing.  Who would put 
with that if they were expecting someone else to handle it all, someone 
who pointedly WASN'T?

Yet I endure my own lack of attention to these matters, and my own 
lethargy just fine.  I put up with things in my own character that I 
could not stomach for a moment in others.  The basic choices between 
doing what needs to be done in my life, and what can be made to suffice, 
are generally easy to make, and usually fall into the greedy clutches of 
the Cult of Good Enough.  Indeed, it's a lifestyle.  Yet the fatigue of 
my days is not illusory, nor is it minor.  All my life it has been 
difficult to summon the wherewithal to do tedious labor on my own 
behalf.  I've been PAID to do it for others, certainly, as if the money 
was a some sort of noble motivator.  It isn't though, nor is the 
destitution that inspires such devotion to duty attractive in any way.

But I'm TIRED, see?  And I have other work to do -- this phlog entry for 
one.  This stuff won't write itself, you know!  This is gold!  And there 
isn't any way for someone as locked into the frame of mind that so many 
ordinary, mundane things are "not worth the effort" to simply put it 
aside and attack said things with a relish.  And without motivation, how 
far do I get next time?  This is another justification.  The "Why 
Bother?" principle of dodging labor: why even make the effort, since I 
won't finish the job today (whatever it is), and I won't go back to it 
tomorrow?  Nice and circular, just like I like my logic.  It's of little 
consequence that the place is starting to crumble, and that we're paying 
for all the water that goes down the drain over the course of the year.

But even THERE I can find ways to put it all into perspective: how much 
water are we losing out of the faucets, really?  I estimate, that, 
between them all, we have one drip every ten-to-twenty seconds somewhere 
in the house.  If that's the case, how much water are we losing?  Let's 
figure it out:

1.)  Compromising a bit, we'll say it averages out to one drip every 
fifteen seconds.
2.)  That's four drops per minute, 240 drops per hour, 5760 drops per day.
3.)  Google says 90840 drops go into 1 gallon, so it will take fifteen, 
almost sixteen days for those drips to add up to 1 gallon.  Roughly two 
gallons, per month, then, and twenty-four per year.
4.)  The way our water billing works, we pay a certain amount based on 
categories of usage -- that is to say, if we use X amount, falling into 
a specified range of gallons, we pay such-and-such; if we use enough, we 
get bumped up to the next category,and pay more.
5.)  Twenty-four gallons doesn't even come close to bumping us up, so 
there's essentially no charge for this lost water.

Looked at in this fashion, anything spent to fix the leaks, even the 
cost of a couple of rubber washers, actually results in a net loss.  Ah, 
but what about the environment, you ask?  Isn't wasting clean drinking 
water wrong?  Well, our water gets pumped up from a large aquifer 
several thousand feet directly under our house.  It runs under the 
entire area.  It's extremely pure, and natively has fewer contaminants 
in it than most city waters do after they've been fully treated and 
chlorinated.  It's very good stuff.  So the water gets pumped up from 
underground, goes to a central station, undergoes some minor filtration 
and settling, then gets pumped out to it's customers via underground 
pipes, just like everywhere else.  This water then comes to our home, 
goes up through our leaky faucets, and drips out to the tune of 
twenty-four gallons a year.  Out the spout, down the drain, and out of 
the house to the septic tank.  From there, out through the leech lines, 
down through the soil, clay, and volcanic cinders that stand in for 
bedrock hereabouts; and then, finally -- you guessed it -- back to the 
aquifer.  Is that a waste?  Well, not of the WATER, but perhaps of 
effort, perhaps of energy.  But it's effort made by machines and 
conveyances, which don't have any opinion on it one way or another; and 
the energy?  Well, I have no idea how much electricity it takes to pump 
up twenty-four gallons of water, but, considering that they don't even 
have a category for anything that small, I assume it isn't much.

So, the question, then, the one you may be justified in asking here, is 
when is a waste not a waste?  Whenever I do the math, baby!

Sunday, July 24, 2011
(c) lostnbronx 2011
CC BY-SA 3.0
lostnbronx@gmail.com