Congratulations on taking a shower

"Before lunch no electricity, after lunch - no water."
This was written on FB a few days ago by a classmate who returned to live in my hometown after graduating from a university in the capital (every time I see a classmate living in the small towns/villages of the country, like me, and not having emigrated, I wonder endlessly. And isn't it clear why?)

Now that I think about the last time I lived in the capital (not so long ago), the situation was the same - either there was no water or there was no electricity in the accommodation. Now I think that, objectively, this could be the main and most important reason why remote work is not so widespread in the country - because the probability of ending up without electricity or without the Internet, or without both, is very high, and the large office buildings in business parks are usually equipped with generators and all sorts of devices to buffer these incidents. But, as strange as this is, this is not the main reason for this.

In addition to the lack of water, every summer in the capital, the heating company, which provides the heating of the buildings, along with the hot water, "conducts prophylaxis" and so the city finds itself without hot water for several weeks, in stages in the different districts or all at once.
Perhaps this company thinks that this is best done in the summer when one can shower with cold water. But trust me, I've tried it and the water is ice cold, so it doesn't matter that it's summer. Or it thinks that people don't shower anyway, so it doesn't matter when it's done, and that explains the terrible smell that permeates the subway or public transport buses, regardless of the season. Or it thinks nothing.

Let me tell you, it wasn't until recently that I blamed people for not showering. Mostly adults don't do this and sometimes I feel sick in Lidl while waiting at the till, maybe because it's the main place I come into contact with people now.

In fact, at the last company I worked for last year and I had to go for a few days to the office of another regional city on the other side of the country to replace the defective laptop they sent me, I was amazed at how smelly the people there were. These were people in their 30's and 40's, men and women for whom it was clear they hadn't showered and didn't shower regularly and that's when I realized that if I had to work onsite with them I wouldn't be able to and I would leave a lot before they fired me.😆
But that's another story.
Like I said, until recently I've been blaming the elderly, but with recent events in the country and what they still allow themselves to show on TV in the news, I think I'm wrong. They are used to living like this. They lived hard before, they live hard now and they are used to it. They accept it as the order of things, the status quo, it is what it is, it cannot be changed. Maybe.

I have to say that I too believed many things before consciously deciding that I should go abroad years ago.
I well remember how I lived during my school and student years, when I spent the summers in the village at my grandparents' house (there was no difference with the situation in the neighboring towns anyway).
I bathed with shampoos and soaps in the river, I washed my clothes in the river, it was something normal, accepted, in the order of things, no one thought about polluting the environment back then, when there was no possibility to take a bath in the bathroom. At that time, I did not accept even the miserable conditions in which we lived, as I told you, in the boarding house of the most renowned language high school in the country, as miserable. I didn't even think that if you find a pile of plastic bottles in nature and you can't take them with you, burning them is not a solution. I didn't think that street and even domestic village cats and dogs could and should be castrated. Mainly because the nearest towns with vets were at least 30km away and I didn't know there was such a thing as pet boxes back then - only found out about them after I went abroad...
There were many things I thought or didn't think, did wrong, forced by circumstances, or took for granted because there was no other way or that's what everyone does...

Back then...
Now we are in the 21st century and we are part of the EU, as they even try to remind us on national television, and hundreds of villages are permanently without water in the summer, in others the breakdowns are constant and they are not included in the list of villages under the regime of the water, they just don't have water every few days or weeks or months...
The country is well watered, there are many large rivers, all kinds of other bodies of water, but... the reasons why things don't work properly are so pathetic that I don't even want to talk about it.
In August, the water crisis that has been heralded all summer seemed to worsen. Forests and villages burned, just where the water was stopped, it was as if on purpose, to make it clear that the fire would not be able to be extinguished in time. Do you know that we don't even have aerial equipment to extinguish fires in hard-to-reach areas, and we are always waiting for a neighboring country or the EU to come to our rescue? But whatever. Now, at the height of the water crisis, even settlements near large bodies of water have decided to take advantage of the general chaos and shut off the water, lol. The water in the village where we live has been shut off after working hours for the past few weeks.
The scariest thing was when it stopped at 5 p.m. on Friday 😂

The next week I called the emergency number in the nearby town to talk to the familiar person I've called so many times already. I've told you about him, I'm sure, every time I'm amazed after my conversations with him. He's extremely rude and uneducated, talks informally to everyone, and generally acts like he's angry that you interrupted his nap while making him do something - his job. Because he is never informed of the accidents in the surrounding villages, the causes, or when the eternal repair will be completed.
But this time something else was added. At 12:17 p.m., the man on the water company's emergency line wasn't just angry that someone was calling to ask him something.
He was lisping as if he were drunk.

This guy is illiterate, you can tell by the way he talks. He's not a foreigner but he even confuses grammar rules and tenses and if you're not a local, I mean if you're a foreigner you probably won't understand what he's trying to say, but this time I felt like on top of all the rudeness and unprofessionalism, he was even drunk. On the one hand, calling this number doesn't change anything, but if you don't call, things get even worse. Because when nobody files a report and makes a claim, things just stay as they are - bad.

In my next post, I think I'll write about why illiterate people end up in all kinds of positions, even very important ones, while people like me are unemployed. This is just important for me personally to note, to be understood, not to be forgotten, I personally need this, no one else, obviously. I think that this is precisely why things in the country are not going well and are in such a deplorable state. It's not because of the low pay. Many people, I have already seen it with my own eyes, have no claim to their wages, they do not even know that they can have something more than what they get, that it is possible to get a higher salary and not live in misery because this can only happen abroad for the common man. It's not because people don't want to work or are unable to work, that they're all incompetent. It's not that, it's just that the distribution of positions is wrong.

And in this wrong distribution of positions, usually people take advantage of the situation and do not do their jobs.
So at the height of the water crisis, a village (and there are so many such villages in the country) found itself with a broken water pump and hidden in all the chaos in the state as an institution, this pump took weeks to fix. If there is water at all, there is no pressure, if there is pressure, there is air in the pipes, which you know what leads to.

I now plan the daily chores and constantly watch the water in the pipes - will I be able to run the washing machine, will I be able to wash the dishes? And will there be water to take a shower?

"Congratulations on taking a shower" - this so familiar phrase that we all grew up with now takes on concrete dimensions.
Can you imagine that? No, you can't. Because Bulgarians in the past, distant and not so distant, congratulated themselves by taking a shower. Do you understand what that means? And the happiness of having water to wash or bathe is already complete when it can really happen between the hours of the water regime or between the constant breakdowns of the water pipes, the constant breaking of the pump in the settlement in which we live, etc.

A few days ago I realized that in this day and age, the 21st century, and me specifically as a person with certain abilities and qualities and all, I'm actually missing the most basic things in life and on this planet.

Thank you for your time! Copyright:	@soulsdetour
	Soul's Detour is a project started by me years ago when I had a blog about historical and not so popular tourist destinations in Eastern Belgium, West Germany and Luxembourg. Nowadays, this blog no longer exists, but I'm still here - passionate about architecture, art and mysteries and eager to share my discoveries and point of view with you.

Personally, I am a sensitive soul with a strong sense of justice.
Traveling and photography are my greatest passions.
Sounds trivial to you?
No, it's not trivial. Because I still love to travel to not so famous destinations.🗺️
Of course, the current situation does not allow me to do this, but I still find a way to satisfy my hunger for knowledge, new places, beauty and art.
Sometimes you can find the most amazing things even in the backyard of your house.😊🧐🧭|