Review: Water Cooler
Our tap water sucks. We live on the edge of town, and draw from a well on our property, and the water that comes out of it is incredibly silty and sulfurous. We've got a thousand-dollar tank full of sand in the basement that all the water runs through (it makes a horrible two-hour-long slurping noise once a week for some reason), followed by a twenty-dollar secondary filter system that I have to pour bleach into every few weeks. And the resulting water is still lousy to drink and turns all the laundry orange. A while back the city offered municipal water to our neighborhood, and our neighbors fought bravely to keep the government out of our lives, and so now we all look dingy and smell like rotten eggs.
We used to keep a Brita in the fridge, but have you ever tried to clean one of those things? So a few years back I bought us a water cooler. It sits in the dining room next to the piano, and every four weeks a couple of extremely grumpy men in a beautiful blue truck show up at 6am and deposit thirty gallons of delicious water on the porch. If we are lazy, we forget to bring it inside and it all freezes, causing the plastic containers to pooch out and refuse to stand flat on the floor. Then we have to wait for them to melt.
I love having a water cooler in the house. For one thing, it is always delightful to bring a device not associated with the home into the home, for domestic use. It’s like having a whiteboard in your living room, or a forklift in the garage. When I'm working, and get up for a glass of water, I feel like I’m actually taking a "break" from "work." There used to be a water cooler at my actual job, as well, but during the budget cuts five years ago our now-deposed department chairman had it removed, in an attempt to appease the budget gods. He also stopped serving coffee at meetings. We have a new chair now, and the coffee's back, but not the water cooler, and so my house feels more like my office these days than my office.
I can't recommend the water cooler we've got, though. It is manufactured by Whirlpool, and has, like a mysteriously increasing number of consumer electronics products, a terrible user interface. One of its "features" is that it keeps a reservoir of boiling water ready to go at all times, by default. We regard this as a crazy waste of energy—and it's noisy—so we wish to disable it. But the way you disable it is by programming an "energy saving" mode, whereby you get to choose the times between which the water doesn't boil. So we have to set these times one minute apart (using the usual up and down arrows to manipulate a bunch of incomprehensible LCD symbols), creating a twenty-three-hour, fifty-nine-minute no-boil window, then enable "energy saving." Then, if the power goes out, which happens all the time here, or if you accidentally unplug the water cooler, it forgets all your settings and you have to do it over. Meanwhile, when the “energy saving” mode is turned on, the “energy saving” symbol blinks on and off incessantly, as though it cannot believe that you don’t want to enjoy a hot cup of tea right now. In addition, you release the water from the tank not with the familiar—iconic, even—flippy blue tab, but with a large rectangular plastic mechanical button that sometimes sticks, making it impossible to stop the flow of water, unless you know the exact correct way to prod it into behaving correctly.
All that said, though, I recommend some variety of water cooler, even if your water tastes OK right out of the tap. Spring water is excellent, at least the brand we get. It's always cold, even on the hottest day of summer, and it makes coffee taste better. It sounds lovely falling into the glass, and then of course there is that famous water-cooler burp that you get at unpredictable intervals. Your guests will regard your water cooler as a quirky, semi-hardcore life hack and will start fantasizing about installing a walk-in freezer or drill press in their own home.
Four stars.
★ ★ ★ ★
