The man who reads our water meter left a note on my door that said to check the shutoff. I don’t have a shutoff problem, and my bill has been the same for years. He’d written the meter number on the note, and it wasn’t my meter. Somehow, my address had been feeding off somebody else’s water line since at least 2009. The city sent a crew, and they were out there most of the day without telling me much.
The foreman finally came up the walk and asked how long I’d owned the house. I told him since 1994. He looked back toward the hole they’d dug and said the line connected to my house wasn’t on any current city map. He asked whether I’d ever had plumbing work done before 2009, and I told him the previous owner had replaced part of the basement line. The foreman wrote something down and then asked me whether I’d ever met the previous owner. I said only once, when I bought the house.
He went back outside and spoke to the crew for another hour. When he returned, he had an old utility map in his hand that looked like it had been photocopied dozens of times. My house wasn’t connected to the line shown on the map. Instead, the line disappeared beneath the property next door. I asked what that meant, and he said the meter assigned to my address had actually been installed at a different house. Then he showed me the billing history. Someone had been paying for water under my address for fifteen years, but the payments weren’t coming from either property owner.
The foreman finally told me the name attached to the old account. I recognized it immediately because it was the name of the man who sold me my house in 1994. He had died years ago. I asked why his account was still active, and the foreman said it shouldn’t have been. Then he pointed to a handwritten notation on the oldest utility map. It said, “Do not disconnect this line without notifying the owner.” Underneath was a date from 2009 and a second name. The second name was mine.
