Song of Suburbia: Groundskeepers

Aaand we're back... First I got sick, then I got really busy, then I got sick of being really busy... So let's get right into it, shall we...?

I am a suburbanite. I like a lot of what urban areas have to offer, but dislike living in apartments... not having parking... not having a yard... and a number of other unavoidable facets of urban living. The result is that, having been raised mostly in suburban environments, I am most comfortable living in  suburban environments.

Never mind the songs talking about rows of identical houses, or the stories about neighbors going to war over whose dandelions are seeding whose lawn -- as with any environment, there are positives and there are negatives.

This post is a gripe session about some of those negatives. (Big surprise, right?) In fact, this is just the first of what I intend to be a series of gripe sessions about the sounds that intrude, sometimes rudely, upon the relative calm that is supposedly a hallmark of suburban life.

For this first "Song of Suburbia" post, I give you -- The Groundskeepers.

Groundskeepers, Type 1

One of the main selling points of my home was the fact that it is on the edge of the development, backing up to a private golf course instead of more townhouses & garden apartments[1]. An added bonus was the fact that my block of homes backs up to the "rough," that part of the course that receives only the barest minimum of grooming.

Correction: my block of homes used to back up to the rough. For two weeks late last summer, I was regularly awakened early in the morning by the sound of bulldozers and graders as the golf course was "refreshed" and reconfigured. It was a minor annoyance that did not last a long time, and once the work was done my neighbors and I simply forgot about it.

This season has been a little different; now that a putting green has replaced the rough, I am often awakened two, sometimes three, times a week during the season at 6:30 in the morning when the club's groundskeepers use their industrial-grade lawnmowers and lawn vacuums to ensure the green remains properly groomed. Everyone else is required by law to wait until at least 8:00am (still not great for me, but at least it affords me an extra two hours of sleep)... but somehow a loophole was put into the law when no one was looking allowing special cases[2] to start making noise much, much earlier.

Annoying, noisy, and -- for individuals like me who work late into the night -- exhausting. But mainly annoying.

Groundskeepers, Type 2

Another landscape-based annoyance are the groundskeeping crews hired by the local homeowners' association to keep the common areas groomed. I appreciate what they do, but not how they do it; any day on which they are working is a day surrounded by intrusive noise. The mowers are started at 8:00am and usually are run continuously until 4:00pm or later with only a 30-minute lunch break around Noon. Even when the crew has finished mowing an area, the mowers continue running -- the crew uses them to shuttle back and forth between different areas in the neighborhood like oversized, roaring Segway Transporters[3].

But wait, there's more!  Once the Mowers have completed their work in an area, the Trimmers move in. These gentlemen have gasoline-powered line trimmers, with the engines mounted on frames they wear like backpacks. They work slowly along the sidewalks, neatly trimming the grass (but skipping sidewalks directly in front of houses, leaving the edges looking raggedy as a reminder to homeowners that they have to trim the sidewalks themselves). As they work, the trimmers will randomly rev their engines, applying more or less power based on how much trimming is needed -- while coincidentally varying the pitch and volume of the noise they generate in a particularly annoying random pattern.

And there's a special additional bonus! The cleanup crew -- some of whom were only minutes earlier Trimmers themselves -- are the last group of noisemakers. These gentlemen walk leisurely around the neighborhood in areas where Mowers and Trimmers have finished. Instead of using brooms to clean off the sidewalks, they use gasoline-powered leaf blowers that I and some of my neighbors have come to call "howlers" because of the noise they make. Revving the howlers' engines in random patterns of pitch and volume, these gentlemen (wearing noise-blocking ear protection the rest of us wish we had for ourselves) blast grass clippings, sand and loose gravel off the sidewalks -- usually onto individual homes' front walks & porches and/or into the sides of nearby vehicles. (As an additional annoyance, their ear protection leaves them blissfully unaware of any approaching traffic as they inevitably walk backwards into the street to admire their handiwork.)

The Howlers show up too late in the day to interfere with any sleep (I long ago learned to not bother trying to take a nap when they are anywhere near my block), but they certainly have an effect that belies the relatively small size of the individual blower units. Hearing the show you're tying to watch on television? Difficult. Trying to listen to music without noise-canceling earphones? Futile. Working in one's own yard amidst the flying gravel and dirt? Dangerous. Concentrating on one's work inside, with all windows tightly shut? Right out.

In short... well, you know: annoying. In fact, annoying the way an angry yellowjacket in one's shoe is annoying, at times. But usually just plain noisy, disturbing, and...

...annoying.

Next up: Lover Boy.

[1]  Never mind the fact that I have absolutely no chance of being able to afford a membership at the aforementioned golf course; I never could figure out the attraction of using strangely-shaped sticks to smack a defenseless little ball around in an effort to put it into little holes in the ground while avoiding ponds & sandboxes...

[2] "Special Cases" are those large-scale commercial property owners who feed large sums of tax money into the system and (purely coincidentally, of course!) occasionally feed large sums of donations into political campaigns.

[3] An embodiment of technology that seems slightly frivolous to me, but for which I am desperately trying to find a good excuse to buy one (once I scrape up the money)...

Blowing Bubbles... Up Where?!?

One of my co-workers lives in an older neighborhood where the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (the regional purveyor of piped-in dihydrogen oxide) has been slowly working its way through an update of residential water meters. In his case, this involved a work crew, a backhoe, and a trenching operation that left the home's yard scarred; replacement of several feet of feeder pipe; a large hole being made in the side of the house (thankfully closed up again at the end of the process); and, almost as an afterthought, a new water meter.

These new water meters are something of a technological wonder. No longer does the WSSC have to send someone to visit each individual meter to either read the faceplate dials of the older mechanical units or insert a reader probe into the data port of the newer digital meters. That is all so twentieth century, as the saying goes; the new ultra-accurate digital meters actually upload their data directly to the WSSC via satellite link, no human intervention required.

Or so goes the theory. The truth is, "Nope, don't work, no way, no how."

Perhaps I should be a little more specific. The data link works exactly as advertised. The problem is entirely constrained to the realm of accuracy.

Historically, water in this area has been relatively inexpensive; for the first few years I owned my current home, my average monthly bill was in the vicinity of $15 even when I rented out both extra bedrooms. Of course, those bills have become quite a bit more expensive in the intervening years, but water remains the least expensive service passing through the walls of my home by an extremely large margin.

Apparently that's not the case for homeowners with the new 21st century super-accurate digital satellite water meters.

The first WSSC bill my co-worker received for his small single-family home housing a frugal family of four topped a whopping $600. Yes, six hundred dollars' worth of water was supposed to have passed through all that new piping and through the sensors of that super-duper new water meter in a single month. Even my co-workers' neighbors with in-ground swimming pools had lower bills, so he immediately logged a complaint with the WSSC customer service staff.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and the next bill arrived in the mail -- the bill that was supposed to include a corrected balance for the previous month.

$14,000.00

Yes, fourteen thousand dollars for a smallish single-family home inhabited by two alert & oriented adults and two alert & oriented "tweenage" kids.

I visited the WSSC website just before beginning this post and checked their billing rates. The highest combined billing rate for both sewer & water usage is $15.90 per every thousand gallons per day -- for 9,000 gallons or more per day. (You can double-check my figures at wsscwater.com)That's nine thousand gallons or more of water per day, a rate of usage that is a physical impossibility for the plumbing in an average home. Even better, if you divide 14,000 by 15.9 you will see that it would take 880 days to incur the charges WSSC insists my co-worker's family owes on a 60-day bill.

My co-worker isn't annoyed; he is livid. His wife is upset and (rightfully) scared that WSSC will insist their insane bill is correct and take legal action to collect the full $14,000.

Me? You guessed it: I'm annoyed. I'm also frightened because I have heard through the grapevine that the WSSC is planning to replace all water meters in the region with the same model that is so thoroughly screwing over my co-worker; worried because I know the WSSC will do everything in their power to put the blame for similar errors on homeowners; and concerned because this is yet another example of how the most glaringly obvious errors remain unseen but actively enforced by the bureaucracies upon which we are all forced to depend.

But yeah, I'm annoyed. I hope other WSSC customers are, too.

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ADDENDUM: 

When I got to work today (several hours after posting the original version of this post, above the divider line) I asked my co-worker how things were going with WSSC. He said that his situation has not changed yet... but that one of his neighbors is also lodging a complaint with WSSC now that his home has one of the new meters installed. It seems that this neighbor's house is not hooked up to the WSSC system -- it draws 100% of its water from a well  and pipes 100% of its effluent into a septic tank, both located on the property and maintained privately by the neighbor -- and yet WSSC is threatening him for nonpayment of his water bill. Go figure...

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be...

(With apologies to the authors of the book with the same name...)

I believe the proper vernacular expression at this point would be, "...aaaand we're back..."  Last Friday, much of the Mid-Atlantic portion of the Eastern USA experienced an event for which the word "weather" seems wholly inadequate. A set of merged thunderstorms moving steadily eastward from the Mississippi Valley came very near to smacking the entire DC metro area flat as a pancake. The result was outages (or disruption) of all the public services we depend on in modern civilization: electrical power for lighting and air conditioning (mostly gone), landline telephone service (disrupted), cell phone service (disrupted), natural gas (pumping disrupted), traffic signals (mostly gone), clean water (restricted use due to pumping station backflow), public roads (many impassable), fuel for vehicles (unavailable when service stations lost power)... the list goes on.

I am typing this late on Tuesday night, almost exactly four full days from the time the storms finally left the area... and thousands of people in the area still have no electrical power, over 100 intersections have no working traffic signals in this county alone, cable TV and Internet service are still spotty, and things like batteries & flashlights are just beginning to reappear in many stores.

Okay, I get it: this was a major storm, not your everyday summer evening thunderboomer that we are all so used to in this area.  (At one point, local Doppler radar showed an unbroken line of severe weather stretching from slightly north of Philadelphia, PA to well south of Richmond, VA.)  But consider, for a moment, the following:

- Many of the local providers of electrical power have been scrambling nonstop since "Snowmageddon" a couple of years back to trim trees away from power lines, refurbish or replace older equipment, and reinforce or re-engineer weak points in the grid, all while making darn sure the public knew all about all the good stuff they were doing.

- Weather forecasts at this time of the year almost always include severe thunderstorm watches or warnings, tornado watches or warnings, and high wind watches or warnings, and yet somehow the public had no clear warning of how unusually severe this particular weather event would be despite the storm system being tracked from its formation roughly 48 hours before reaching the area.

- A series of powerful thunderstorms, complete with extremely strong "microbursts" and mini-tornados, have repeatedly interfered with all the affected services over the past several years and yet none of the "preparation" for serious weather events was able to prevent said repeated disruptions, much less the massive collapse of almost all public services that for many people is still ongoing, 96 hours after this particular bout of severe weather left the region.

This is the 21st century, folks. You know -- moon bases, flying cars, weather control, all that jazz. Okay, the space program (at least in this country) has been sliced & diced almost out of existence, the flying car is still a concept very much in development[1], we are still learning how weather works with no sign of actually being able to control it anytime in the near future...

... but this is the twenty-first century. Why, oh why, can we not build basic infrastructure in a way that prevents a single bout of severe weather lasting only a couple of hours from absolutely obliterating all the services that make modern life different from life in the 12th century... and then remaining disrupted (or wholly nonexistent) for days at a time afterwards?

Yeah, I'm annoyed, you betcha...

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[1] Considering how most people drive, I have come to believe that we are all far better off without flying cars... It's hard enough to travel on (or walk across) a road filled with vehicles that only move in two dimensions -- can you imagine the chaos if we had to worry about drunk, inexperienced, distracted, angry, sleepy, incompetent, and/or just plain unlucky drivers above and below us as well...?!?!