When faced with the minor inconveniences that are a matter of daily life in Cairo it's nice to see the humorous side of things.

Recently we have experienced a few instances of the water suddenly being cut off. The first incident occured during my mother's visit just after we spent the morning touring the pyramids around 1pm (i.e., we were disgusting after walking in the desert surrounded by camels). When we discovered it was off we asked our bowab (doorman) who said it would be back in an hour so we went ahead with our trip to Coptic Cairo assuming it would be working when we returned. When we arrived around 6pm the water was still not working and the bowab again told us an hour. After another hour with no water we called our landlord who explained that there was an outage affecting a large portion of Cairo and he estimated it may take anywhere from a few hours to a day to fix. He also assured us that the bowab had no way of knowing how long it would take and his estimates were invalid. We were a little perplexed how the landlord got this information from the water department so late in the evening, but we took it at face value and prayed for the best.

As we were still completely gross after a long day of site seeing we had the unique opportunity of bathing in bottled water, which is sort of like indulgent camping. The next morning, after a few starts and stops, the water came back on and we put it behind us.

Last night we encountered yet another water loss. This time it occured late at night just after we had taken a shower, so the timing was much better. Again we rang our landlord and the conversation went something like this:

12:00AM
Me: Hi there, any idea when the water will be back on?
Landlord: I called the central water authority and they said a water main broke near Sharia Hassan Sabry and it is affecting several blocks.
Me: I see
Landlord: They said it would take until 8am to fix it.
Me: Oh, ok (this sounded like positive news since I was about to sleep)
Landlord: I asked "hey, why is it taking so long?" and he said there was some electrical wires and a tree right next to the pipe. Therefore they need to get government approval before they can remove the tree.
Me: Government approval eh? (feelings of doubt cast over me along with remorse for the tree)
Landlord: Yes, but he said they already got the approval so they are starting now.
Me: Sounds good, thanks for the update.
Landlord: No problem.

What I found peculiar about this conversation was how our landlord (who is a doctor and not affiliated with the central water authority) could find a number to call in the middle of the night to ask why the water didn't work. Not only that, the person who answered the phone knew exactly what was wrong as if he was standing there himself. The landlord then not only questioned the man about the details of the problem, but openly questioned their abilities by asking why it would take so long to fix (again a timeline that seems reasonable).

I can only conclude that doctors in Egypt have a secret list of phone numbers that provide them with direct access to the highest reaches of the bureaucracy. While this sort of thing does raise some questions about privilege, it is handy when the water runs out.