For April 1st, rather than the usual satire-posing-as-reality I felt like some straight-up poking fun, in this case at The Bottled Water Crowd. Oh, bottled water has its place I suppose. Mostly when thirst strikes in a theme park, or when one is out and about and wishes to avoid the empty calories of sugar-laden sodas. But I still routinely see people buying cases of the stuff at the supermarket, and I always wonder two things:
-Do they realize how much this costs? and,
-How do they really know what taps the bottled water came from, and how do they know those taps are better, somehow, than their own?
Join me then as we examine what the industrialist is thinking when it comes to bottled water. The industrialist who has duped all these millions of people.
This is an excerpt from The Virtue Polarization, a short story I'm writing. It's set in the fictional universe of The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks, my novel which will shortly be on Amazon in both print and eBook formats.
Here's the page for the evolving short story, and the rest of the site concerns the novel:
https://sites.google.com/site/tmwwmms/home/the-virtue-polarization
And here you go with the water excerpt.
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He was already considering the notion of expanding into non-alcoholic beverages such as soda water. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, the public could even be coerced into buying water itself, in little disposable bottles, rather than drinking it out of their tap. Hudeler had always been maddened by the notion that water, one of the most basic necessities of life, was almost free to the average man. Yes, of course it was plentiful, but it was also extraordinarily valuable. Just ask the fellow dying of thirst in the Sahara. Or those crews of becalmed ships during the age of sail—water rations running out, throats in unspeakable pain, yet surrounded by more water than the human mind could ever comprehend—all of it salt and undrinkable. And water had, further, to be clean! The chap suffering from cholera or dysentery was the very one to ask about the value of water’s cleanliness.
Giving thoughtful consideration to the total absence of a thing was, in Hudeler’s view, the best way to learn its true worth.
Yes, all one needed was just the right set of marketing messages, delivered over long periods of time and with savage consistency, and, so Hudeler was convinced, one could induce the rabble to fear the very taps in their own homes, and to buy an endless stream of bottles and cans of expensive water instead. It was his secret and grandest dream, as the volume of such water sales would make Slore’s output of beer seem as a mere eyedropper in comparison.
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