Topic: WATER SHUTOFF THIS AFTERNOON ON PCWSD1

[♥♣ ~Maynard~♣♥]

MAR 4-WATER SHUTOFF THIS AFTERNOON ON PCWSD1

THE PULASKI COUNTY WATER SUPPLY DISTRICT NUMBER ONE FROM BUCKHORN WILL TURN OFF THE WATER FOR REPAIRS TO THE LINE, STARTING AT 1 OCLOCK THIS AFTERNOON, AFFECTING, RESIDENCES RESIDING ON T-HWY, REDOAK AND ROULETTE AREAS. WATER WILL BE RESTORED AS SOON AS REPAIRS ARE COMPLETED FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL 774-3049.Just in case someone didn't noticeFrom KJPW

[blissfullybusy]

geeze this would have been nice to know yesterday!!!!  Noone in my neighborhood knew it was going to happen

[♥♣ ~Maynard~♣♥]

geeze this would have been nice to know yesterday!!!!  Noone in my neighborhood knew it was going to happen

Heck woman I did and I'm a 1000 miles away      Bahahahaha

[♥♣ ~Maynard~♣♥]

We need some fresh pictures of that pretty baby lady     

[JuneBug67]

I agree when and how did they put this information out? Didn't effect me too much today but I had a very unhappy neighbor.

[darrellmaurina]

I agree when and how did they put this information out? Didn't effect me too much today but I had a very unhappy neighbor.

Local utilities use KJPW radio to get announcements like this out. They probably do the same on KFLW but I do not monitor that station regularly.

Before people ask, I would need a full-time paid employee or 100 percent committed volunteer staff member to be willing to run public announcements like this. Some of these are of an emergency character and I cannot let people get in the habit of relying on me for this kind of announcement unless I am 100 percent -- not 99 but 100 percent -- sure I can deliver them without fail, all the time.

Too many things can go wrong for me to make that commitment without a full-time assistant.

[JuneBug67]

Darrell, I wasn't implying it was your job to inform me or the community for that matter of water being shut off. I was just curious how Maynard who lives so far away knew of the water being shut off and me, someone who lives here and was effected by the water being turned off had no clue.

[cowboy]

It was on the KJPW web site, which is where maynard got it just as you could have

[darrellmaurina]

Darrell, I wasn't implying it was your job to inform me or the community for that matter of water being shut off. I was just curious how Maynard who lives so far away knew of the water being shut off and me, someone who lives here and was effected by the water being turned off had no clue.

No problem... my comment wasn't directed toward you in particular.

In the past people have asked why various utility companies or cities don't use the Pulaski County Web to make announcements, or why some media receive these notices and others do not.

It would be possible for a city or a utility to register here on the Pulaski County Web and post their own notices, but up until very recently, the radio was the only way to notify the general public of emergencies, water shutoffs, etc. I do not have the staff in place to make sure that these get posted every time without fail within just a few minutes of being notified, and that's what I would need to be able to do if I wanted to post these notices myself.

[♥♣ ~Maynard~♣♥]

It was on the KJPW web site, which is where maynard got it just as you could have

There you go telling my secerts again.......... Oh wait I do post....From KJPW online........don't I     Never mind     

[blissfullybusy]

Here is my problem... we live in the electronic age.... It's VERY simple to ask residents for their email addresses and send ONE group email to PWD#1 if they are foreseeing having an outage.  My word they don't even take debit cards there. You have to pay with check or cash.  Bizarre to me.

I have a neighbor that bottle feeds her child and all the sudden she had no water and no vehicle to go get water.  I just happened to be available to get some for her.  I understand if something breaks but a PLANNED outage should have been better planned.

[darrellmaurina]

Blissfully, I agree with you. But remember, this is rural Missouri, not Silicon Valley.

We have people in prominent positions in area government and business who do not even have computers in their home and rely entirely on their secretaries to interface with the electronic world at work. And when it comes to bill paying, remember that we still have people in this area -- and not a small number of them, either -- who still drive in person to utility offices to make payments in cash.

There is a huge -- and I mean **HUGE** -- disconnect between the tech-savvy younger generation of military personnel and retirees and the people who have lived in and run Pulaski County for decades. Technology is only one example of that disconnect.

Business and government leaders in rural areas usually lag at least a half-generation behind their urban peers in technology, not because rural people don't like technology but because the people in charge are from a generation where technology simply wasn't emphasized. In urban areas companies are large enough that if the owners or managers aren't tech-savvy, they hire a person who can do IT work and bring the company up-to-speed. In rural areas, often there isn't the demand for high-tech things and even if there is, the people in charge may not be able to understand or sympathize with it because that's not the way they do things in their own lives.

None of that is being critical of rural businesses -- many rural people are very much up-to-speed on the latest high-tech developments in agriculture. I saw that firsthand as a reporter in Iowa with graduates of Iowa State University who were some of the most computer-savvy people I've ever seen -- these are the people whose fathers had been on the cutting edge of new tractors or planting techniques, and who knew how to apply technology to their rural businesses to give themselves a competitive advantage.

It **IS** saying that things which would be expected in an urban area just aren't going to happen around here quickly unless many people demand them. Technology costs money, and lots of it, and in a business struggling with economic challenges, money will only be spent where it absolutely must be spent.

Here is my problem... we live in the electronic age.... It's VERY simple to ask residents for their email addresses and send ONE group email to PWD#1 if they are foreseeing having an outage.  My word they don't even take debit cards there. You have to pay with check or cash.  Bizarre to me.

I have a neighbor that bottle feeds her child and all the sudden she had no water and no vehicle to go get water.  I just happened to be available to get some for her.  I understand if something breaks but a PLANNED outage should have been better planned.

[blissfullybusy]

With all do respect...perhaps I'm living in a different decade than you.  Email has been around for a LONG time, my 6 year old daughter can send an email.  Surely someone at the water district is more capable than a 6 year old child.

And you speak as if we live has some hillbillies with an outhouse and and stream to bathe in.  I get frustrated with the "rural" Missouri mentality.  We are not that rural.

[darrellmaurina]

With all do respect...perhaps I'm living in a different decade than you.  Email has been around for a LONG time, my 6 year old daughter can send an email.  Surely someone at the water district is more capable than a 6 year old child.

And you speak as if we live has some hillbillies with an outhouse and and stream to bathe in.  I get frustrated with the "rural" Missouri mentality.  We are not that rural.

Your example of a six-year-old child is actually a really good one. I'm old enough to remember when "childproof caps" first became common on medicine bottles. Result? My parents started calling them "parentproof caps" because kids could figure them out easier than most adults. Computer usage is a generational issue, and a pretty major one.

You and I have no disagreement about what should be the case. It would be wonderful if a utility company collected e-mail addresses when people signed up for service so they could send announcements. That would cut costs and improve efficiency in many ways, not just emergency situations or planned water shutoffs.

However, I know businesspeople in this area ... prominent businesspeople ... for whom the concept of maintaining a list of e-mail addresses is something utterly foreign. Even in the news media business, less than a decade ago I was working for a newspaper whose publisher didn't think reporters shouild be allowed to have access to individual e-mail and thought all e-mail should be routed through the editor as a single point of contact. In that newspaper, we had a reporter younger than me who was still writing her stories in longhand on legal tablets before typing them into her computer because that's the way her teachers had taught her to edit before typing the "final copy" on the typewriter. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that, until I realized I was the only person who had been in the media more than a decade who saw anything wrong with that.

On the hillbilly issue -- I have friends in the online news media who are utterly amazed that an online newspaper can function in rural Missouri. "Do those people even have computers?" is one question I get asked. My answer: Absolutely -- and they may be checking their e-mail on their cell phone while driving their pickup truck down a potholed road and taking a phone-cam photo to post on the Pulaski County Web along with an angry "nastygram" about the state of road maintenance, right after their post about guns or fishing.

The problem doesn't seem to be the "hillbilly types." I don't want to name anybody here, but I know lots of people who would describe themselves as "proud rednecks" who are not especially computer-literate but are quite capable of using e-mail and the internet.

The problem lies in an entirely different area -- not the "hillbilly types" living off on some ridge or hollow, but rather the people who have a fair amount of education and money and professional status, but come from a generation before computers were commonly used in small or medium-sized businesses.

Most businesses are run by people in their 50s and 60s, not people in their 20s or 30s. With very few exceptions, people my age and older did not grow up using computers regularly unless they were techie types, and if they were techies, they probably didn't stay in rural Missouri in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Result?

We have some businesses around here run by people who may understand computers and what they can do, and we also have businesses run by people who do not understand computers at all and do not have any idea why their employees are urging them to spend money on technology. There is a big difference between the two.
 
My guess is it will probably take another decade or two -- in other words, when that generation retires -- before computer familiarity becomes universal.