I read every single word of your post. Why am I mentioning this? Because I can totally relate. Where I live, we don't have any issues with water, and neither do my parents or other relatives, thankfully, water is not a problem for us. However, generally speaking, we are also moving backwards in other ways. The concept of wealth and poverty that you expanded on so meticulously really resonated with me.
Looking back, my parents are more established and have flourished financially, but the country as a whole hasn’t. We face situations similar to your "water complaint operator" experience in almost every government department. If the electricity goes out, you have no idea when it will be restored. They often just leave the phone line busy. I also recently wrote about my passport application, I paid for the fast track but never received it any quicker, and I had no one to follow up with regarding my queries.
Why is it like this? We, as a nation, are also to blame. We’ve grown accustomed to being content with the bare minimum. Or maybe it's because we don't have the energy or resources to challenge the system. I’m not sure if it's corruption or other factors at play, but we've been conditioned to be satisfied with a "just put out the fire" and "survivalist" mentality.
I remember your post about passports and running out of ink. Then I was: Wow, we've never had a situation like this.
But here, as you can see, we have problems with other things - water and electricity too. In a conversation with an acquaintance recently, she asked me what life was like in a village, because she was thinking of moving from the town and working online. I told her she needed a generator. "And how is the internet, because years ago we were known all over Europe for the top internet?" - "Well, that was a long, long time ago, more than 10 years ago. Then the phone service providers monopolized that market too, kicked out almost all the small ISPs that offered quality service and drastically reduced the quality while increasing the prices every year." This is just one small example of how it goes backwards. At the same time, the country absorbs resources from the EU, which imply development, at least I think so, but I see a constant regression. My partner tells me that I don't see progress because I live outside the capital where everything is happening, but when I lived there last there were also problems with water and electricity, even though people have jobs and get higher wages there...
I agree. Bulgarians also settle for little and simply survive. They even taught us that in university lol. Our entrepreneurship teacher had said this: "Do you know what Bulgarians are famous for? - By surviving in any conditions."
The government knows it, companies know it, even foreign employers take advantage of this fact.
But with us, there is something additional, which is quite worrying for me personally. We have a saying: "It is not important that I am well, it is important that my neighbor is worse off."
Many people try to mask this trait of mentality, but it is visible in everyday life. Here is, for example, how our neighbor calls when the water stops. He finds out that we also have no water and ok, that's it, so I'm fine, as long as my neighbor is in the same situation, I don't need to do anything else, let the work be done by someone else, I won't file a report, none of my business. Then how can you expect this neighbor to help you with anything?
That's why every time I'm abroad, I'm amazed, even shocked, by the random acts of kindness of total strangers, because I've never experienced such things in my own country, where people lack many... human traits. And as I have always said - I am too sensitive to live in this country, at the very least, I care about hygiene, which can hardly be maintained under these living conditions.