“Warm showers for everyone,” I exclaimed the other day! It had been a few weeks since I could enjoy hot water in the shower before my morning commute. See, the people who run my building had just put in a new water heater but there was a problem with it. It couldn’t generate enough hot water for all the people taking showers in the building.
The other residents knew this because there were signs hung up in the hallways like, “Not enough hot water? Call your landlord!”
Did knowing about the problem cause people to conserve hot water? No, it did not. Actually, on more than one occasion I could hear people doing laundry at 8:00am and using up washing machines full of hot water!
I remember studying communism in high school and the main takeaway was always that communism is a good idea in theory but could never work because there will always be greedy and corrupt people to ruin it for everyone. It’s not just greed and corruption that keeps people from allowing communism to work. Generally speaking, people are drawn to thinking like a capitalist. Since everyone in my building has “heat and hot water included” included in their leases, they felt like they were entitled to all the hot water they wanted. Of course, this left me (and presumably other tenants) taking cold to cold-ish showers for several weeks while they fixed the water heater.
