My Faucet Got a Raise Before I Did

The tap ran warm for the first eleven seconds this morning, the way it does every October because the pipes under my yard haven't heard summer is over. I stood there holding the coffee carafe and counting, like I've done for twenty-some years. Somewhere around second eight it hit me that, as of today, those eleven seconds cost more than they did yesterday.

The new fiscal year started this morning, and the average residential Austin Water bill went up with it, about $7.76 a month according to the Austin Chronicle. Low-income customers may qualify for assistance, and if that's you, call the utility and ask. The forms exist. Nobody should be playing hero over a water bill.

As for the rest of us, the faucet got a raise. I've been at my job longer than that faucet has been at its job, and nobody has called me into a conference room to discuss my compensation. So I called the faucet in. Fair is fair. Every employee deserves an annual review, especially the ones who just got a pay bump without asking.

Attendance

Excellent. I'll give it this much. In all the years I've lived in this house, the faucet has shown up every day I've turned the handle. The only exceptions were the boil-water days, when it technically came to work but nobody was allowed to touch anything it made. I remember standing in an H-E-B aisle with a jug in each hand while a man in a Longhorns visor explained gallon logistics to his teenage son like he was planning a moon landing.

That wasn't the faucet's fault. It was management upstream. Still, it goes in the file.

Temperature Management

Needs improvement. From June to September, the "cold" side delivers water at roughly the temperature of a dog's water bowl left on a porch on Manor Road. You run it, you wait, you run it some more, and eventually you give up and drink it lukewarm, like a Victorian invalid. Then sometime around Thanksgiving it swings so far the other way your teeth ring.

The faucet says this is the pipes' problem, not its own. It is very much an employee of the modern Austin economy.

Flavor Profile

Most of the year, Austin tap water tastes like nothing, which is the highest compliment you can pay a municipal product. A couple of times a year it picks up that faint earthy note, the one that makes you wonder if the lake is trying to tell you something. I don't hold it against the faucet. In a town where a coffee shop off South Congress will describe a pour-over as "notes of stone fruit and creek bed" and charge you seven dollars to taste it, my faucet does the same thing for free.

Well. Less free than yesterday.

Total Compensation

This is where I had to take my glasses off and rub my eyes.

Seven dollars and seventy-six cents a month. Ninety-three dollars and change a year. In the grand scheme of Austin bills that's a rounding error, the kind of number that gets a shrug at a city budget hearing and three paragraphs of panic on a neighborhood listserv. But this blog has one job, and that job is to remember what money used to do in this town.

Seven seventy-six used to be a whole Tuesday night. I came up on a stretch of Austin where three bucks bought a pitcher at a dive that's now a building with the dive's name stenciled on the lobby wall, as if that's a memorial. Two pitchers and a basket of fries, and you'd still have quarters left for the jukebox. That's seven seventy-six. You went home happy, slightly damp, and smelling like a fryer.

Today, seven seventy-six is what it costs to sit at a bar on Rainey and look at a cocktail menu written in lowercase. It doesn't get you the cocktail. It gets you the right to read about one.

Here's the part that stings. The water is the one line on my budget that still did what it was supposed to do. Rent climbed and took the stairs two at a time. Property taxes showed up every year like a cousin who wanted to borrow the truck. Groceries now cost what groceries cost. Through all of it, the water bill sat there like a reliable old dog, mostly the same, asking for very little, wanting only that you not water the St. Augustine on the wrong day.

Now even the dog is asking for a little more each month. And I know why. Pipes are expensive. Treatment plants aren't run on good intentions and Topo Chico. A city that doubled in size at the speed of a rumor has to pay for the plumbing eventually, and the bill always shows up at the back of the line, where the people who've been here longest happen to be standing. I understand the math. I just don't have to like the shape of it.

Areas for Growth

I gave the faucet some development goals. Every good review has them.

1. Get cold faster in August. This is your entire brand.
2. Stop dripping at 3 a.m. I can hear it through two walls. It sounds like a tiny metronome counting my money.
3. Communicate rate changes in person. I'd respect it more if the faucet looked me in the eye and told me itself, instead of letting a paragraph in the paper do it.
4. Consider the old hose. The garden hose out back has been working harder than you for years with no raise, no review, and a kink near the spigot nobody's ever fixed. Morale is low out there.

The faucet didn't respond to any of this. It just dripped. Once. Right on cue.

Manager's Comments

Overall rating: meets expectations. That's the most anyone in this town can ask of a public utility, a landlord, or a weather forecast, and two of the three rarely deliver.

The faucet will keep its job. There's no alternative candidate. I looked into collecting rainwater, but the barrels at the big-box store cost about what fourteen months of the increase does, and my gutters drain onto the neighbor's carport, which is its own unresolved civic matter.

So I filled a glass at the sink this morning, waited out the warm part, and drank it slowly, standing up, looking out the window. The way you'd drink something expensive. That's the trick to living in Austin now: you treat the cheap things like luxuries, so the luxuries don't know they've got you beat.

Tap water is still the cheapest drink in town.

Give it a few more fiscal years.