Yet Another Broken Sprinkler Head

Southern California is a desert. Grass does not really grow here. One of the adjustments of moving from back east is presence of sprinklers everywhere. Every yard, every strip of grass has sprinklers on it. Every house has some kind of crude sprinkler system. When I was a kid, one went out and "played in the yard". Today, in Southern California, if one plays in the yard, one is very likely to bust a sprinkler head within five minutes.

A bust sprinkler head is a site to behold. Water gushes out of the ground like a geyser, ten feet into the California night sky. Because sprinklers usually go off in the middle of the night, it takes about three weeks to realize that the sprinkler head is off. The easiest way to discover this is to observe the only muddy yard in the neighborhood, a neighborhood that is in fact naturally a desert where no mud should naturally a exist.

Naturally, I come to the realization that I have shot $600 dollars of water into the night sky over the course of the three weeks. My theory is that $1 billion dollars of water is shot into the night sky every year because of busted sprinkler heads. Wait, that's just my house...