sunken sidewalk
Sep. 1st, 2009 08:10 amYesterday I discovered that, when a city lists a phone nbr as an emergency one, they have a rather elastic definition of 'emergency'. I had barely started my day at the office when a neighbor called to say that the water meter's well in front of our house was filled with water, and that the sidewalk around had sunken a couple of inches. By the time I got home, my wife had called the city. A couple of hours later nobody had shown up so I called. It turns out that they have 24 hours to respond to such emergencies. That had me wondering if I should have lied and said that the situation was so severe that our home was about to fall into Hell's muddy pit, but luckily the emergency person showed up not too long after my call.