Squidfry 02.17.22: Road Trip

ROAD TRIP… There’s not much Squid enjoys more than kicking back with a tub of shrimp-flavored popcorn, spending a day watching humans play sports. (Squid prefers to avoid exertion.) So when Squid learned that Monterey Bay F.C. would open the soccer season on March 12, Squid oozed over to Cardinale Stadium in Seaside to be the first in line for tickets.

Squid was surprised to see renovation work still going on. So Squid took a closer look at the schedule and found that the new pro team will be in Phoenix on March 12. The next weekend? Colorado Springs. Then it’s on to Oakland, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles and San Antonio. That’s seven games on the road before the team’s home opener on May 7. Squid counts in base eight, but that’s 10,800 miles round trip, measured by a Google road map search.

The construction timeline was upended because FIFA awarded the World Cup to Qatar and Qatar demanded that event be moved to November. To avoid conflict, USL Championship pushed its normal start date up by over a month.

Work is on schedule to wrap before the delayed home opener. But after the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which lost a number of pros to a competing golf tournament in Saudi Arabia, Squid can’t help but ponder why events that happen in the Middle East keep messing things up here.

WASTE NOT… One thing Squid prefers about the ocean over land is that there are no borders – creatures are free to go where they please, so long as they can survive. But Squid gets why there are borders on land, because you humans are mostly fixed in place, and have to worry about things like getting water, power and other terrestrial concerns like sewage infrastructure. (In the sea, we don’t worry about waste – aside from the plastic junk humans keep dumping in it – because we have shellfish that take care of that.)

But it must have come as a surprise to some customers of local wastewater utility Monterey One Water – about 8,000 total customers in Seaside, Sand City and Castroville – when they recently received a sewage bill in the mail to be paid to Soos Creek Water & Sewer District in Washington state. Huh?

Mike McCullough, a spokesperson for M1W, says the mistake was made by the third-party billing contractor. “It’s not something we had a lot of control over,” he says, adding the agency is taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Any bills that are, or were, sent to Soos Creek, he assures, will be refunded, and says the agency has put out the word in revised bills and on its website and social media accounts.

Squid can sympathize – Squid’s made Squid’s share of mistakes – but dang, Squid hopes no local residents end up paying to dispose of someone else’s s**t.