I’m terribly sorry, but water these days is the only thing I have on my mind, and since you were interested I our faring, you’ll get what you asked for. The last time we had a tiny little bit of water coming out of the pipes was on Tuesday, 8th July. That’s almost a full week ago. On that day we got almost half a day of relatively low pressure supply and the pump had been working for hours, so I figured that our reservoir on top of the room must have been full. At least that offered some consolation.

I’ve begun changing my tactics in communicating with the water company. I usually try to have a calm and civil conversation about the matter, whenever I call their customer service ay 11122. The last week I witnessed a number of my neighbors handling this in a totally different way. They immediately start yelling into the phone, clamoring how their poor old “yayah” (grandmother) sits there in the house without any water, how the little baby desperately needs water, how are they supposed to clean the house and do the washing without any water, and on and on and on. Then they start threatening to go to the local papers, to the radio stations, to the local television and expose this poor excuse for a service. The icing on the cake is given when they swear that their lawyer will hear about this. It doesn’t change the flow or pressure of water, but apparently, for some reason, it brings (yet another) technician to the neighborhood almost instantaneously. I’ve noticed that they’ve begun digging holes in the streets here and there too. Maybe that just window dressing to keep us calm…

So now I’ve been calling them every day, twice a day, adding my share of verbal abuse. My previous approach over all these months didn’t have any tangible effect anyway. Of course I don’t have the expressive power in Greek as do my neighbors, but I’m beginning to become really desperate about the situation, and as an old chinese proverb says: “when in Rome, howl with the wolves”, or something like it.

Of course all I get are the same get-off-my-back-and-leave-me-alone-with-my-frappé-and-my-newspaper type of answers. “Yes, we’re working on it, a normal supply will be restored this afternoon”. Then nothing happens. In the “afternoon” naturally the customer service telephone line is closed and we get another day gone by without water for our patience. They switch on an answering machine which doesn’t even give you the satisfaction of being able to leave a message so that you can yell into the phone to vent your frustration. On Saturday evening I got the number of a technician from one of my neighbors. It was around 8 o’clock. When I called I got a friendly male at the other side who said that he was fully aware of the problem and would go out immediately to switch off the supply to Knossoú Road, which would channel more water in our direction. Creative thinking! I was impressed. At twelve o’clock midnight I was less impressed when we still hadn’t seen a drop of water. Of course, the next day being Sunday, nothing would happen, so we went to the beach to soak ourselves in salt water and rinse it off with a shower nearby, as we had been doing every two days for the last weeks. You see, there is always a sunny side to every nasty situation.

On Monday the yelling and shouting into the phone could start again, this time with the effect that a container truck with water showed up to fill the reservoirs with water pumped from elsewhere. We would be so lucky! When it was our turn, I pointed to the roof top to indicate where the tank was. “Oh no, they didn’t go up there, only ground lever reservoirs were being filled”. Damn you Δ.Ε.Υ.Α.Η.!