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.