Friday, April 01, 2005

Liquid Refreshment

Welcome to Friday and the last of five consecutive essays about, one way or another, the place where I work.  I wrap up with the final business name from Richmond or Albany, CA.  Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Dogs are said to do it because of a temperature differential – a perfectly logical syllogism.  Cool water is more refreshing than warm water; water kept in a plastic bowl on the kitchen floor is warmer than water kept in a shaded porcelain tureen; therefore, they drink from the toilet. 

Well, I don’t go so far as to drink form that particular fixture, but all my life the bathroom has had the best tasting water in the house as far as I was concerned.  It felt colder, tasted fresher than kitchen water.  The kitchen tap was fine for water for cleaning things – not so much for drinking.  I never actually did a test, partly from my perfect confidence in the results I’d achieve, and partly from fear that my hypothesis would be crushed, crushing me along with it....  But really, I know it and have always known it: in the house in the Valley where I grew up, in both dorm rooms and both houses where I lived in Philly, back in central LA and then up to Pacific Heights in SF: the sink in the room with the lock on the door gives forth the sweetest water.  Needless to say, it’s true in both of the bathrooms at my current home – and it’s true at work as well.

I’ve had a lot of jobs, one way or another, since I was 16 or so.  I can’t claim to remember all the particulars with particularity, but I can say that my experiences with office kitchens – real or “coffee” – have been predominantly, if not uniformly, disappointing in terms of drinking water palatability.  It always tastes as if it had been stored in the fridge for a few days first, then left to rise to room temperature in a cardboard amphora.  In the glass, it displays a milky opacity that slowly resolves into an infinitude of microscopic bubbles that, bursting, signal the expiration of all flavor and refreshment. 

But as far as I recall, any place I was able to set up my own desk and workspace, I’d bring in a cup and start filling it at the bathroom sink, where the water was inexplicably cool and delicious right out of the tap. 

( - and let me pause for a moment to confirm that, notwithstanding LA’s tired tap water from the tailings of the Colorado River before it evaporates into the Mexican desert, and whatever Philly has that it calls tap water (eau de Schulykill), the tap water in SF is exceptional.  Pure Sierra runoff, captured in the vast reaches of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, a veritable drowned Yosemite, piped cold and clear and clean to us 24/7.  Good stuff.)

I asked the maintenance supervisor at the building where I work about this curious phenomenon of delicious bathroom water and disappointing kitchen water, and received the unhelpful, oblivious answer I’d expected: “Is it?  Well that’s weird.  Well.  I suppose it… No.  No idea.” (Could it be that the bathroom water is routed closer to the building’s cooling vents?) “Oh!  Well that’s… oh, I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  Naw.”

These incisive insights into the mysteriously refreshing washroom water have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of the indisputable facts.  I now take my 32-ounce lexan bottle to the bathroom sink and tip it carefully to fill it, scrupulous not to touch the bottle to the edge of the tap where god knows whose raunchy hands may have only just now been thrust, caked with filth, potentially depositing viscous wads of uncleanliness on the metal spigot – but, despite this tangible risk, I persist in getting my water there, and nowhere else. 

As an added bonus, sometimes I confuse people when I leave the bathroom with a full 32-ounce container of clear liquid.  They look from me to the jug and back, two or three times sometimes.  I force them to shake my hand, and then go about my business.  Bathroom water makes me strong - if not positively cocky. 

Final business name from Richmond or Albany, CA: Pic-n-Pay.