Drops in a bucket

and how it adds up

I think a lot of people see little value in the tiny things we do as resistance. When we hear about others doing these big, loud protests, our little nickels and dimes can feel pretty pointless. But I’ve been in a very unique position of watching the tiniest things add up into something big.

You see, I’ve been analyzing data about small things adding up for the last 8 years.

In Jan 2017, I started a job at city hall in the utility billing department. Yes, that was me you called when your water bill was too high or your garbage bill had extras on it. My particular specialty was analyzing the reads from the water meters when they came in from the field to look for potential read errors (they were read manually) and possible water leaks at a property.

I would send out a letter to the customer when they usually consumed about 20 units of water but we measured (and double checked) that they had consumed 100 units this billing cycle. That letter was both a notice that they were about to get a really big bill, and a nudge that they might want to check the pipes or other places where there might be a problem on the property. Then I would process the leak adjustments when they came in to offer some relief from that high water bill.

So I spent my days pouring over numbers to look for something out of the ordinary, and then evaluate the explanation for it. I saw dripping faucets that cost hundreds of dollars in water loss. I saw pinholes in irrigation lines that cost thousands.

In my current job, I try to get customers to reduce their energy consumption during peak hours. Like all supply and demand, when demand for something is high, it costs more. So my job is to try to reduce those peaks in energy consumption so we can still supply power, but at a lower cost and from greener sources.

After events where we ask our customers to reduce their power use for a couple of hours, I go over all the meter data and analyze how much energy was used compared to how much we anticipated would be used.

The difference is significant. By asking a large amount of people to contribute just a little something, we can see the difference in power consumption across the entire grid.

When people ask me why I do something as small as Liberal Rocks when they think we all need to be doing something bigger, I know they are asking because they just don’t have the view of how it adds up that I have. I have seen how a drippy faucet, consistently dropping one little drop at a time, can use more water than filling a swimming pool. I have seen how a bunch of people turning down their thermostats a couple of degrees for 15 minutes can save enough power to power an entire home for 9 months.

When I say to you that “every little bit helps”, I’m not saying that the way your mother says “just be yourself!!!” and you just brush off. I’m saying that as someone who has spent her days studying the numbers of itty bitty things adding up to have huge impacts for the last 8 years.

Resist where you can. Pay cash at the grocery store and deny Visa that transaction fee. Buy from minority owned businesses where you can so Walmart comes up short on its next earnings call. Donate that $5 to your candidate in an important race.

And above all else, rock on!