A Water Leak Adventure, Featuring Yellow Crime Scene Tape

A water leak is nothing to laugh at. I know. Recently, I was lucky enough to experience one after returning home from five glorious days spent with family in a state north-ish of where I live. Needless to say I was not amused to arrive home to find a small pond in my front yard.

Image by sanjit pandey from Pixabay

Actually, it wasn’t directly in my front yard. It was in the front of the side yard and located inconveniently close to a power transformer. You can imagine my dismay at the thought of trying to determine the source of the leak while barely two feet from a high-voltage device that could have made me wish I had never been born.

Fortunately, we live in a 55+ community with a full-time manager. So, I got on the phone and told my story. Not too much later, a maintenance-type person in a rather fashionable golf cart made his way to our property where he thereupon decided he had no intention of messing with the growing area of moisture now threatening to overtake the green transformer monster. He set up some orange cones and yellow police tape and went on his way.

The phone rang not too long after that. On the other end was the almost too polite office assistant who had called to inform me that I had to contact the county. Merry Christmas to me! There is nothing I love more than calling a government office in hopes of actually getting something done.

We’ll Be There Shortly

My lovely wife spared me the indignity of dealing with bureaucrats who have no sense of their commitment to taxpayers, let alone their own self-worth, by making the call for me. She was promised by the ever so chirpy call answering person that “we’ll be there shortly.” That was at roughly 1 PM. The emergency crew dispatched to ensure our neighborhood would not be flooded by county water arrived somewhere around eight-ish.

Perhaps that was a new world record for county public works departments, but the work crew appeared a bit tardy to me. Actually, it wasn’t a crew initially. It was just one unlucky sap in a pickup truck destined to stick his hands in a miniature pond instead, of watching Monday Night Football, in hopes of finding something to unclog. But alas, the unlucky sap was joined by a second person about an hour later. A third unlucky sap in a much larger truck joined the party somewhere around 10 PM.

You haven’t lived until you’ve reached your bedtime while a county truck is digging large holes in your yard. The noise and vibrations were enough to make Sleeping Beauty go ugly – if she didn’t get enough sleep, of course.

Check Out the Crime Scene

The boys in dirty denim blue finally wrapped up just after midnight. I awoke the next morning to witness what appeared to be a crime scene in my yard. Yellow tape as far as the eye could see. Strangely, the property manager’s orange cones were gone. Had the county workers simply appropriated them for themselves, or was there a cone thief loose in the neighborhood?

I couldn’t have cared less. What concerned me was all the neighbors gathered around to see the goings-on. This was a major happening in a 55+ community where the most exciting event is the garbage truck driving through three days a week.

To make a long story short, which is to say I realize you don’t want me to ramble much longer, it took another two weeks before the county came back and cleaned up their crime scene. But now we have grass where there was once a large hole and a deep pool of water. Here’s hoping no county workers were hurt in the fixing of the leak.