Why DrillList exists

We called the well company about four weeks before we thought we would need them. The water was already going. Two weeks later it was gone.

None of that was the drilling company’s doing. It was busy season, they kept a wait list, and we were on it. The work ahead of us was real work that took the time it took, and every person in front of us was waiting for exactly the reason we were.

So we called. Then we called again. Then we emailed, and then we called about the email. Not because anyone had done anything wrong — because there was no way to know anything. Every day without an answer turned into another phone call, and every one of those calls landed on the same two people in the office, who were fielding the identical call from everyone else on the list.

Nobody in this story was behaving badly. The office was doing its best with a list and a phone. We were doing our best with a house and no water. The pressure ran both directions and it came from one thing: nobody could see where they stood.

At home it was simpler than that. A wife and a teenage daughter with no running water want the water back. The proposal that we treat the whole thing as an extended Pioneer Days did not carry the vote.

None of it needed a faster rig. It needed one text message: where we were on the list, and whether that had moved since yesterday.