I was surprised to see the City Utilities trucks on my drive home from work today, just as one might be surprised to see a clown car or a tank. I know these things exist, I just don’t see them in my day to day life, and certainly not on my street. As I squeezed past them, I wondered what they were doing and wished they had posted some sort of neighborhood notice, but whatever. I recognize that they can’t always give notice when they’re working in a neighborhood, so I pulled into our garage and thought nothing more of the matter.

That is until I tried to turn the water faucet on a few minutes ago and got nothing but a gurgling sound and a bit of air. I tried some different water faucets, then went down to the basement to make sure a pipe hadn’t burst. As I started to call City Utilities to find out if there was an outage of some sort, it dawned on me… “There were some CU trucks just down the street earlier. I wonder if they did something?”

Venturing outside, which I so rarely do unless provoked, I tried our outdoor spigot and then knocked on the doors of a few neighbors. It’s a mixed blessing that no one else seems to be home tonight, I suppose, and I quickly found myself wandering down to the CU trucks just a block away to find out what was going on. As I approached the truck, four men in a huddle turned to me.

“Your water’s down,” one of them said.

“Yeah, I wondered about that,” I replied.

Their huddle dissolved and one grabbed a tool, another a hose, and a third began to walk towards the front of the truck while the fourth picked up a large, metal T-pipe. “We’ll have it fixed in just a few minutes!” the presumed leader said.

I loitered for a few seconds more before heading back to my house. Nothing more to see here, move along.