Colombia, Missoori

Earlier this summer, I received a letter in the mail from the City of Columbia. And in full disclosure, I looked at the envelope and was so alarmed by the terrible font choice on the envelope that I threw the envelope into the trash without opening it. Considering the font choice made it appear that we actually live in Colombia, Missoori my linguistically snobby self couldn’t be bothered for the contents. (Honestly, I assumed it was a mass mailing with a note of “hey, we increased your water rate/electricity rate/trash rate.)

A month later, another envelope arrived from the City of Columbia with the same terribly disappointing font choice. But I did open it this time, more out of curiosity at this point than any sense of duty. And as you might guess, I wasn’t being gifted the keys to Colombia, but rather the city wanted me to have our Backflow Water Assembly checked AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and no one has ever said the words “Backflow Water Assembly” to me. But according to the letter, the assembly must be checked annually. It must be certified by a person found in a state approved database. Why no one has mentioned this in the previous 9 years, I’ll never know. You probably know from this point on, nothing goes well in this story.

For starters, after the second poorly addressed letter arrived, the emails of urgency started. (The font in those emails were normal, in case you are keeping track.). And then when I scrolled through the state administered database, there weren’t a lot of approved assembly checkers in Columbia. And then when I found one, they were all booked up because apparently everyone else is also receiving urgent poorly addressed correspondence about their backflow assemblies.

Finally I found one. I won’t name them here for various reasons. But I will tell you that they charged $350 per store to come look at this mysterious piece of very important hardware. Is that expensive? Is it cheap? I wouldn’t know since there is no backflow assembly point of reference.

The guy shows up and as it turns out, a backflow assembly is some random piece that is basically on our water meter. As best as I can discern, it acts as a final safety to ensure that none of our dirty water goes into regular drinking water. Obviously, I’m not a plumber and neither was this person. He was actually an HVAC person but the state said he could look at backflow water assemblies.

So he looks at the one at Nifong and then he looks at the one at West and consider it a miracle, but they both pass. It’s difficult to get super worked up about stuff like whether or not it is going to pass when you don’t even know what it does really or why everyone suddenly wants to discuss it or actually even what makes it pass or fail. $700 is a relatively small price to pay to not look at that font ever again, right? They even put a laminated tag on the piece with a zip tie so that any official stopping by could rest easy it had been inspected. (I would NOT put this past the health inspector to check, honestly. And I would bet you every dollar I have that she has no clue what a backflow assembly does either.)

And because you know it wouldn’t end so easily, then next day the back room at Nifong that houses the mysterious backflow assembly had actually flooded. That morning, I walked into a respectable amount of water just swirling around on the floor. It did look like clean water though, so I guess that’s a positive. The water streamed out in more than a trickle but less than a pouring. Unsurprisingly, HVAC man doesn’t fix floods.

So then a plumber showed up and asked why I had someone come look at the assembly in the first place. I said I was basically forced to by aggressively - yet poorly written - city communication. And the shortest way to wrap this up is to tell you that when you pressure test a backflow assembly valve, you can move sediment around that doesn’t like to be moved around and then you break the assembly and then you spend $1,308 to fix the assembly that was actually working well before someone demanded that we check to see if it was working well.

Please know this ranks in the top five dumbest things I’ve dealt with this year and that is leaving room for the Colombia/Columbia envelope.