Well, the people who have to pay for the fuel notice when they don’t get it, I can testify to that! Our gas provider once filled a neighbor’s tanks instead of ours, causing ours to run out during the coldest part of the winter. I’d have lost some pipes if I didn’t have a wood fireplace with a steel insert. (I’m big on resilience and efficiency through disparate redundancy, which attitude my family finds annoying except when the heat, water or electric fails.)
In rural areas of the US, where there’s lots of room and people are more likely to be prepared for property defense, oil and gas tanks are almost always outside and exposed. In urban areas, where space is tight and people are more likely to be dependent on unreliable gangs of thugs for protection, they are inside or buried (but people steal fuel anyway, sometimes using boltcutters to remove locks from the fuel caps).
OK, the rest of this post is getting transported to a more appropriate thread.
About once a year I read a story where someone does indeed notice - because they didn’t retain their oil tank, and someone delivering to the wrong address fills their basement with oil. Apparently this happens about six times a year on Long Island alone.
Fumes leave their house uninhabitable long after the oil is mopped up. If the oil gets into the ground, cleanup costs go way up. No-one is ever thanked for the free oil.
It was that ‘6 oil-flooded basements a year on Long Island’ stat that made me think - because that requires that the oil guys get the spigot wrong and the tank at the other end of it is missing. Which makes me think that filling the wrong (but extant) tank must be a fairly common occurrence…as per @Medievalist’s experience.
Some of you might remember that my high school senior is in the non-enviable process of applying to college. April 1st (in most cases, although she did have an Early Action acceptance too) is the standard acceptance date, and then there are admitted student events at the schools during April, and then May 1st is the deadline for the student to make a choice. She went to two of these overnight on-campus events for the two schools she felt were her best choices and then spent time thinking and talking about how those visits clarified her perceptions about what it would be like to be a student at those schools.
Today is Friday. On Tuesday, she came home from school and said that since it was obvious to her which college she should accept, she was ready to do so. I reminded her that I had said whenever that point came, she was to wait 24 hours before officially notifying the chosen school. So we talked about it at some length and then she went off to do homework. On Wednesday, she came home from school and we were going to sit down at the computer (there’s a non-refundable deposit involved, and she’s just barely under 18, so I have to sign off on some things) but life interfered for about an hour and then she had too much else to do. Instead, she came home during the day on Thursday and we did it then.
So, officially, she is going to college! For anyone keeping track, she made the “obvious” choice: the highest ranking school that accepted her, which is one of the top in the country, and because it is a university rather than a college she has options if she decides to change her major (which would have been harder at the small colleges).
Friends are congratulating me, but honestly I’m just relieved that the process is over! At this point, as long as she doesn’t flunk her English class (all her other classes are above and beyond graduation requirements) – and she currently has a solid “A” – she is graduating and starting adulthood with at least the next 4 years sorted out. Whew!
Put in my two weeks at work. I didn’t hate the job, but it really doesn’t work well with my school schedule and I found one that pays better. Best part is I don’t have to work for a couple weeks before finals.
Yeah – I def. should have checked out the A/C on the test drive. ::LE SIGH:: But the heat and other things that take moisture away from the windows worked. And I can roll everything down. So there’s that.
The CEO called me today. She’s (finally*) willing to amend my employment agreement to reduce my weekly working hours. No details yet (wage reduction et al). But FUCK YEAH!
* it probably helped that I didn’t kept my job interviews too secret…
It’s been 27 years of fighting hard, but finally there’s victory for the families of the 96 victims of the Hillsborough Disaster, and the people of Liverpool.
I saw him on the news blathering about it trying to make out it wasn’t his fault the Sun ran the story that way. He even affected a tearful quiver to his voice, the mendacious shitbag.
I’m not even from Liverpool, but I wept when I heard the news. My heart goes out to the families and fans who not only lost friends and loved ones, but then laboured under official disapprobation for a quarter of a lifetime. Whether this historic injustice links to Thatcher’s dependence on the police during the miners’ strikes, I don’t know.
It’s shameful that the police’s instincts remain to close ranks in the face of failure, but at least the public are more vigilant in the face of it now - see the case of Jean Charles De Menenez, for example.
And fair play to Andy Burnham, who has consistently pushed for the enquiry.
