Oddly enough, the subject of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies came up at dinner Saturday night. We have a couple of folks who are big fans of those movies – though it seems like they are fans in sort of a post-ironic hipster kind of way, if we may say so.
Anyway, after the jump, this week’s TMQ…
In case you haven’t heard, customers who get water from the City of Austin are under a boil water notice. The water treatment plants are overwhelmed by the volume of silt and organic matter that’s being stirred up by the release of water from the dams, as a result of the continuing rain in the area.
At my office, the water fountains, water dispensers, and coffee makers are completely shut down. (Even though the fountains and dispensers have their own filtering systems.) I’m lucky: the MUD that services our house in Lakeway is not impacted by this, we don’t have to boil our water, and I can put coffee in my Yeti cup (thanks to my beloved and indulgent sister) before I leave in the morning and keep it hot until I finish it off.
But I digress. I tried going over to the Dunkin’ Doughnuts near my office yesterday to see if they could do one of those big coffee boxes for the office. They just laughed at me. (Hey, I figured these places had their own water filtration systems.)
I just called over to the Starbucks nearest our office to see what their status was. (Again: Starbucks brags about their water filtration system.)
Not only was that Starbucks not doing the big coffee boxes, they were not brewing coffee at all. The guy who answered the phone told me none of the Austin Starbucks (79 of them, I think he said) were brewing coffee: if I wanted coffee, I’d have to go to Cedar Park, Georgetown, or Round Rock.
What does a Starbucks do if they can’t make coffee? I guess you could boil water (or heat bottled water) and do tea from teabags. Maybe serve pastries?
One of my cow-orkers said earlier that they expect this to go on for another twelve days. I can’t find any news or official government source that’s reporting an expected duration for this boil water notice, though, so I’m taking that with a grain of salt.
I swear, you people are going to make a prepper out of me yet.
Joachim Ronneberg, certified Norwegian badass.
Mr. Ronneberg led the commando raid that blew up the Nazi heavy water plant at Telemark. He was also the last survivor of that raid.