What a Bunch of Assholes

Friday is garbage day in my neighbourhood. Garbage day used to be on Tuesday for the last 25 years, but last year the city came out with black box garbage pickup and grey box recycling. I suppose that fewer trucks were needed with the new system and thus the newer trucks could cover more ground each day which tossed the old system out the window.

I have mentioned before about how I hated my garbage man in “Be Good” July 25^th 2012, and again on August 31 2011 in “Look In On Me”. I think I covered the ground well enough. Now I really don’t have anything to complain about. I put the bins out and at some time in the morning it is picked up in an efficient manner and disposed of. The only thing I could complain about is that the recycling truck comes too early some days and I have missed getting the bin put out. It isn’t a big deal because I rarely ever fill it up and I can easily wait two weeks. Not having something to complain about is hard on a man of advancing age.

 

I have to commend the city and the waste people for doing a great job. The key to a well run organization is to have no one even notices that there is an organization at all. That means everything is running smoothly. Even old farts can’t complain because things are working too well. Well we can but it is much, much more difficult. You know, if what I just said is true then perhaps there are a whole bunch of well run services that I don’t even know about.

We take all of these things for granted until for some reason or another, the services are taken from us. In many areas of the world there are rolling “brown outs” when the need for electrical exceed the supply. I live in an area that to my knowledge has never had a brown out, and very few “black outs”. That smacks of a very well run electrical service. In Calgary, the city water tastes sweet and pure. I am tempted to say as pure as a mountain stream, but it is better than that. Did you know that there is no where on the planet where it is recommended that you drink from a stream without first purifying it? There are places where it is unlikely there will be giardia or some other water borne pathogen.

 

Many years ago now, there was a problem with the water pipes in our area and they needed to be repaired and we were without water for a couple of days. The city brought a water tank truck and parked it up the street, but that was for drinking and the judicial use of toilets. It was an inconvenience, but not insurmountable, for most of us. My daughter took it as a personal attack against her by the city. How dare they cut off her twenty minute showers twice a day? I can still feel her wrath, but it was directed towards the city water department and not me thankfully. She had to shower at a friend’s house for a couple of days. It isn’t in the same league as children starving in Africa, but close.

The only department of the city that fall behind for me is the roads department. During the spring and summer the roads are pot holed and all of the gravel from the winter was piled at the side of the roads. To my way of thinking, they could combine the two problems and fill the pot holes with the gravel for a temporary fix. I don’t even want to get started on how useless the snow removal in this city is. The lines on the roads are so faded, that the best we can do is to guesstimate where the lanes are. It’s kind of nice to have some department to complain about, I was beginning to think I might have to start saying nice things about the city while I was having coffee with my buddies.

Boy, that city road department…what a bunch of assholes!