30 April, 2026

£4,803.40 a Year for Water?

When we picked up the keys to the rental house we’ll be living in while our home is repaired following the flood that forced us to evacuate, I took an initial meter reading then got in touch with super-reputable water company Thames Water to let them know the situation.

A digital water meter showing the value 381641. — The Chicory House’s water meter, found in a cupboard, is so much easier to read than the one at our regular house, which is found down a frequently-flooded manhole on the busy road outside.

Unfortunately, Thames Water had fucked-up¹ and created an account for us already with the wrong information², so by the time I’d reached out to them they were already getting themselves into a pickle.

It turns out that, presumably because of some shortsightedness on the part of their software engineers, their computer systems wouldn’t let them change the information to correct the problem. Nor could they simply delete the account and create a new one³. Instead, the had to close the account they’d erroneously set up such that the start and end date of the contract was our moving-in date… and then set up a new account starting from the day after.

Sigh. Fine! So long as it’s sorted, I didn’t even care. Until, that is, the bill arrived for the one day of the first (incorrectly-created) contract:

A Thames Water bill dated 18 April, for an account being closed '04/09/2026', covering a billing period of 9 April - 9 April, for £13.16. — This looks pretty low for a metered water bill, until you realise that it covers a period of *literally only eleven hours* from us moving in (and taking a meter reading) until the end of that day. And that during most of that time the water was switched-off because a pair of plumbers were installing a new bathroom!

That bill:

is for £13.16.
covers “9 April 2026 through 9 April 2026”, i.e. one day.
- (which means that our estimated annual bill would be £4,803.40 (£13.16 × 365) – about eight times the national average)
states that our account closure was/will be “04/09/2026” – the only date on the letter that’s in “short” date format and which would appear to be 4 September (in UK date format) even though 9 April would make more sense (but would require interpreting it in US date format, which would make no sense).

Let’s see how that breaks down:

Breakdown of the '1 day' bill covering three cubic metres of water at £2.7346 (usage) and £1.4721 (sewerage), plus fixed charges, totalling £13.16. — The rates are standard, albeit a little on the high end: Thames Water need to raise funds right now to fix all of the leaks in their pipes, apparently. What’s odd is the volume of water they claim has been used.

According to this bill, we used three cubic metres of water between collecting the keys (at around 1pm), moving in, and taking a meter reading… and the end of the day. That’s three thousand litres of water.

Is it possible to achieve that level of water usage in the nine hours of billable time that this bill covers? I guess, if you really tried, you could:

completely fill and then drain our 100-litre bathtub, three times an hour, taking a five-and-a-half minute bath in each before draining it again, for the rest of the day⁴; or
run the kitchen tap – the highest-pressure tap in the house – continuously for six hours and forty minutes; or
repeatedly flush all three toilets, on “full-flush” mode, once every 79 seconds until midnight⁵, for example.

Dan, a white man with a blue ponytail, wearing a green t-shirt, watches a stopwatch timer on his phone while filling a measuring jug from the kitchen sink's tap. — Some science was involved in the writing of this blog post.

Obviously this is all ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous.

But then again, so is this bill, which claims that three adults spent 11 hours in a house and somehow used the amount of water that’s the recommended amount to drink in a day… by 1,500 adults. Despite the water being shut-off to install a shower and toilet for some of that time.

But then again, so is Thames Water’s computer system, which disallows the correction of mistakes even by their own staff and instead requires the creation of one-day contracts. And also can’t decide which country’s date format to use. And, possibly, doesn’t allow them to obey data protection laws.

The whole thing’s ridiculous. Which I’ll be letting Thames Water know. Let’s see if they agree.

Footnotes

¹ This may be no surprise to anybody who’s ever dealt with Thames Water before, or who follows the news about their seemingly endless inability to keep clean water in its pipes and raw sewage out of our rivers, for example, while taking out loans in order to pay bonuses to their self-back-patting executives.

² They used information provided to them by the estate agent and failed to connect it to the information they already had for us… which thanks to quirks of their information systems resulted in bigger problems down the line. Amusingly – and for a change! – none of the problems were related to my unusual name, this time around.

³ Curiously, these initial mistakes on the part of Thames Water left them processing personal information about me – an email address – that I’d never given to them, and allegedly unable to delete or correct it for six months after being asked to. This is the kind of thing that normally gives me an excuse for a field day of DPA2018-related letter writing, but this time around I’ve been too busy dealing with the bigger problems they’ve created to have a chance to stop and think about that: that’s how much of a mess they’ve made.

⁴ It’s only barely possible to repeatedly fill the bath this quickly, you need to use both hot and cold water: the cold inlet alone doesn’t have the pressure to fill it fast enough, but the hot water tank has its own separate inlet which makes all the difference. Also, a cold bath would suck, even if you’re only allowed five minutes in it before it’s time to drain the tub and start filling it again.

⁵ I once had a really rough night after a particularly dodgy curry, but I’ve never needed to be flushing a toilet twice a minute for eleven hours.

Reply to: locked-open

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

What’s the opposite of locked-in? Locked-open. Mwhahaa.

Dave Winer ☕️ (via Mastodon)

If only locked-open were easier for things that aren’t software. Like standards. And concepts.

If you’re developing software (like Mastodon), locked-open can be enforced by e.g. AGPL. You can change it, but you’re likely to have to share-alike.

If you’re developing standards (like RSS), locked-open can only be enforced by interoperability. If somebody wants to make a breaking change, they can… if they can make it popular enough.

If you’re developing concepts (like podcasting), locked-open becomes a matter of principles. You and I might know that a “platform-exclusive” podcast is outside of the spirit of the standard because it’s not distributed by an RSS feed to which anybody can subscribe.

But for these more abstract ideas, “locked-open” enforcement becomes a matter for education, optimism, and hearts-and-minds. And there are companies with huge resources that are willing to fight against all of those.

rejecting convenience

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

why bother going to the brick-and-mortar store? amazon is more “convenient”. why bother cooking a nice meal for yourself? doordash and uber eats are more “convenient”. why go out and socialize with people? facebook is more “convenient”. why use a digital camera, camcorder, or polaroid? your smartphone is more “convenient”. why bother going to the theater or concerts? netflix and spotify are more “convenient”. why bother making art? asking an AI to generate it for you is more “convenient”.

well, i say nuts to that. from now on, i’m going to make my life as inconvenient as possible. i’m going to go to the store and buy stuff in person. i’m going to make my own food with my own hands. i’m going to socialize with people face-to-face. i’m going to use a true camera instead of my phone’s camera. i’m going to buy blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs instead of streaming. i’m going to take my time when creating, watching, playing, and reading a work of art.

…

RNotté, in rejecting convenience

I’m seeing an growing movement in indieweb, revivalist, and adjacent circles that express RNotté’s sentiment: that the endless (and highly-marketable) quest for increased convenience in our lives has gained us free time, but we’ve lost something along the way.

What we’ve lost varies from case to case, but includes freedom (from lock-in to subscription services), creative satisfaction (from convenient “artistic” expression), privacy (from becoming the product, packaged-up by big-data advertising-funded tools), and social interactions (from so much of “social” media).

But reading RNotté share their thoughts on the matter today was the first time that it’s reminded me of The Matrix.

There’s a bit where Agent Smith says, to his captive the rebel captain Morpheus:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.

Smith goes on to elucidate that his personal explanation for this fault was that humans depend upon suffering and misery, while acknowledging that there are other explanations. And perhaps we’ve touched upon one.

Perhaps humans – all humans – have a limit for how much they’re willing to accept convenience as compensation. Connected humans in The Matrix grain a convenient life, superficially superior to the struggle for survival experienced by humans living in the real world, short on food and hunted by machines. But to get that, they trade away their individual ability to become aware of the truth and, collectively, the ability for humanity for shape its own destiny. But there’s something about the imbalance of power in the arrangement niggles in human minds, and some rebel against the established order… and are joined by others who are shown that an alternative is available.

Clearly – as RNotté and others show – faceless technological forces need not go quite so far as enslaving an entire species before “convenience” no longer becomes a tolerable mitigation!

I’m not convinced that seeking out inconvenience is in itself a good. But questioning what your conveniences are worth and what you’re paying for them… that’s definitely worthwhile.

Watch it twice

Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition…