You know what's awesome? Tap water.

A few months ago my office was renovating and ripping up everything in sight to make our workspace bigger, brighter, higher in fiber, and all other kinds of better.  In the process of renovating they tore out our office kitchenette and moved it from one side of the space to the other and this meant, of course, that the filtered water dispenser thing also got moved.  I bought a bottle of water at the store (the super, XXL sized bottle of water in fact) so that I could have something to drink at my desk one day and inevitably I ran out of water that afternoon.

I couldn't just leave the office to go buy more water.  I also couldn't fill up my bottle from the filtered dispenser.  Instead I took the obvious next step and went into the bathroom with the intention of filling up my bottle in the sink in the bathroom.  Of course, when I got there and tried to fit my crossing-the-desert sized bottle under the faucet that didn't work very well.  I stood there and laughed like a loon because the situation seemed funny to me at the time.  While I laughed I heard the bathroom door open and a woman who worked in an office down the hall from me walked into the room.  She asked why I was laughing and I explained that the universe had decided I was not going to have a drink of water today apparently and gestured with my bottle toward the sink to show her it didn't fit.  She looked at me and said, "You were going to drink the faucet water?" as though I had told her I had accidentally dropped my lunch in the toilet but I was going to eat it anyway.

I was shocked that there are seriously people in this world who would not drink water out of a sink faucet.  This was especially strange in New York City as we have some of the nation's best water.  A few places in the country have water that tastes or smells like any combination of chlorine, copper, dirt, and rust so in those places I can understand preferring bottles of water but in New York our water tastes fabulous and is smell-free right out of the tap.  What made this even worse though is that I could feel the ghost of every single person who lived before the 1880's speeding towards us with the intent of bitch slapping this woman into the oblivion.

Humanity has searched for ways to purify water for as long as there have been people.  Water purification was mentioned by Hippocrates in his search for improving the health of humanity.  There are pictures of water purifiers found in the tomb of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II.  Sir Francis Bacon performed experiments to purify and desalinate water in the 1600's.  Drinking water that tasted good and wasn't going to kill your ass was more important than any philosopher's stone or fountain of youth ever could have been and we finally began to master the concept in the late 17th Century with the creation of sand filtration systems.  From there we moved to large scale filtration on a municipal level in Scotland and England later began to put government regulations into place to prevent outbreaks of cholera and other horrifying diseases.*

So after hundreds of years of scientific progress making it so that water is not only potable but can actually be accessed whenever you want it by turning a knob in your home we have let bottled water companies convince us that the water you find in your kitchen or bathroom that flows so free and clear people from the 1500's would have thought it was the work of a benevolent, wizardy baby Jesus is inferior to water that you can get prepackaged at the store.  The most hilarious (as in hilariously terrifying) part of this is that bottled water is subject to less regulation than the water that comes out of your faucet so there could be all sorts of horrifying things in that bottled water and they wouldn't be required to tell you or clean it in future because there are no laws forcing them to do so.  Some bottled water companies literally just pour faucet water into bottles and call it a day but others create their own filter systems and you have no one regulating what those systems are or how they should work.  I knew advertising and marketing were powerful things but I hadn't known they could make someone reject something as pure and safe as modern drinking water.

So you know what?  I am declaring today Tap Water is Awesome Day.  Go and have a drink of water right from your faucet.  Take a shower and know you are completely safe from water-born diseases while you do so.  Make sure to give some to your children and pets too!  And if someone gives you a hard time about the tap water in your glass you should feel free to rant at them about the history of water and tell them they are an unappreciative jerk.

*This information was found at the following website: http://www.nesc.wvu.edu/old_website/ndwc/ndwc_DWH_1.html