@Gcubed: ""any company in China can hire foreign workers"

Only if the company first acquires approval to hire foreigners (People's Republic of China Employment License for Foreigners).

Well so far they are neatly packed in old shoeboxes. That'll change once the kid comes of age to play with them, but even then they are probably nicer to step on than Lego blocks (though I cannot see avoiding to get those too).

With a small baby in the house, we find home delivery of food a big convenience, and end up with quite some disposable chopsticks that way.

I have understood that it is possible to ask to not include chopsticks in the deliveries, but either we often forget it or the stores ignore the request.

Anyway, what I do with the extra chopsticks, is store them unused and once the kid is older I will let him play and build something of them.

Well I think that it is not so much about surviving, as it is about being prepared.

And therein lies the problem.

People in general tend to overprepare, and when schedules change like this, they do it multiple times.

In case like this, when it is about water, the result is that people stock up water that they never end up using, which is bad for water conservation.

I will be first to admit that we stocked up water in every available bucket, including the washing machine and our baby's bath.

That water we then had to just give up, when water kept flowing and we needed those buckets for other things.

I'm pretty sure that across the whole Panlong district, this badly managed operation costed almost as much water as was saved in previous winter's water outages that were specifically done for water conservation.

Though, given my argumentation in this post, I'm not sure if those conservation efforts in past years produced any real conservation either - awareness perhaps, but maybe not more.

Is it possible that individual buildings or complexes have stopped water themselves in expectation to the district wide maintenance - which was rescheduled?

I can well imagine that some building managers would not bother to restart water and instead just wait for the postponed maintenance.