I had a real hard time figuring out the nature of the society in which this took place, which took me out of the story entirely. It was really hard to assess the narrator's views of the world when the world itself was so vague - there was no clear reference point to figure out how unreliable she was. We know there's apparently not much production, and there's a carnival, and there are plenty of hair salons. There's a class system where everyone but the narrator, her boss/partner, and the water guy are grunts. Water seems to be a commodity, but there is free water available which is of lower quality, and water salesmen offer a "first order free" policy. I can't see how these threads combine to make a coherent view of the world. I certainly did not get the sense of water shortages of the type Mur describes - growing up in Israel, even though water was always available, there was always an impending sense of how limited a resource it was. I did not get that sense here.
Overall, then, this one fell flat for me.