DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Which would you rather drink — water that has been processed to within angstroms of its life, through a million dollars’ worth of machinery and hauled by truck for 1000 miles, or fresh mineral water taken straight out of the ground in rural California, about 100' from where you drink it?

The answer, clearly, is the former. But I guess you’d want to see both waters before you decide.

On the left: a pristine, ultra-purified, $3 bottle of Penta Pro — clean, hyper-oxygenated, and free of every weird chemical you can think to worry about.

On the right: 12 oz. of my well water, bottled from the kitchen tap a few hours after a fumble-fingered technician ran an incomplete backwash cycle on my water softener.

A “backwash” is the process that reverses the water flow through the system, flooding out all the sediment that the filters have trapped. A complete backwash will dump all this iron, sand, various mineral nastiness, etc., into the waste pipe. The obvious problem with not allowing the backwash to complete is that all the stirred-up muck flushes not into the ditch, but into my house. Nice, eh?

The water cleared up by the next day. The technician had the good sense not to bill me, and I had the good sense not to invite him back to service my water softener again.