How did these adults manage to get this old?

Sometimes you just have to wonder how a person has managed to live as long as they have...

There was a flood in our apartment building a few days ago. Today the water was shut off for most of the morning while they fixed the broken pipes. For several days now, notice that the water would be shut off today has been posted in all the elevators. You can't get into your apartment without using one of these elevators, the doors to the stairs are locked, so unless you are being a hermit, you have been in an elevator and have seen the notices. Even if you haven't read them.

So lets take a count of who didn't know about the water being shut off... a staggering number in the teens, if not more.

The most egregious ignoring of the notices award goes to the dentist. She has an office on the lower level of the building and was in the middle of a dental procedure that requires water when the water was shut off. This is supposed to be a well-educated, literate person who needs to use the elevators to get to and from her car in the parking lot every day and runs her own professional business.

So what is the stupidest thing you can do during a water shut off... kill your children.

We have a pool. The pool is full of water. It is treated daily with bleach and other chemicals. The award for most dangerous stupidity goes to the woman who came down to fill her children's water bottles with water from the pool. She had to be told by other shocked adults in the elevator not to give this water to her children. Just imagine explaining what happened to your children to a person in Emergency at a hospital - this should get you locked up for life-threatening stupidity.

The children of tomorrow have no chance, the adults have doomed them, but how did the adults get to be as old as they have? What did our western society miss? Has wealth and over-abundance made everyone stupid about basic human survival? Has clean running water readily available in a million taps made people forget how precious that is?

Forget the danger of a comet hitting the planet and wiping everyone out... we seem to be doing the job ourselves.