By Steve Fey

We all do, of course. Here’s a real-life example from a few weeks ago. We were moving into a house in Nevada, after driving almost eight-hundred miles over two days, in a car packed full of stuff and cats, a pickup truck packed full of more stuff and a dog and towing another car packed full of yet more stuff. We’d had so much fun doing all that so we decided to spread the joy and hire a few big guys to unload the even bigger truck that the moving company had parked in front of our house.

One of the things we brought in the pickup truck was a water cooler. We’ve had it for a while, because even in Denver it’s dry enough to make your skin look like an iguana’s. In Nevada, the iguanas all complain about the dryness leaving their skin dry. Sales of iguana hand crème are hot, but for us humans, cold water is pretty much a necessity. We’d set up the cooler almost the first thing when we arrived. Since we were carrying approximately the weight of the Titanic anyway, we didn’t pack any bottled water. Instead I just ran a bottleful of water out of the bathtub and put that bottle of water on top of the cooler.

One of the big guys, in the way of big guys, got thirsty. When he saw the cooler we had this conversation:

Big Guy: Boy, that’s the way to go! Keep this thing, and don’t use that stuff that comes out of the tap!
Me: Oh, that is just tap water. I just . . .
Big Guy: (interrupting) No, I mean this water in the bottle here. It’s the way to go! Keep on having it delivered!
Me: But, uh, sure, I’ll do that.

I didn’t lie. Last time I checked the water is still being delivered, under pressure, through taps all over the property. Five inside and three outside, unless I missed one.

Is that cool or what? I felt like Penn & Teller on a show they did once about bottled water. They had a "water steward" deliver what was tap water out of a hose to people with some story about how special the water (in a fancy bottle) was. People seriously compared the qualities of the "different" types of water. One of them had a dead tarantula in it, which made it worth even more. And here, without even trying, I demonstrated the exact same phenomenon.

I could go into a rant here about how political types exploit us by playing to that particular brand of stupidity. I could, but I won’t, because in the words of the first President I ever voted for (or against, for that matter, but I did vote for him): "That would be wrong."

Later, fellow water lovers.