hmmm. Yes another bee in my bonnet this morning. Waste and bureaucracy. Its time for a rant!
Let's deal first with bureaucracy. I grew up in England where bureaucracy was and still is rife. So many rules to follow, with rules behind them to make sure that the rules created several iterations ago are still supported and enforced, oh and let's have a NEW rule about that rule this morning.
I left England a long time ago and came to Canada (and believe me we have more than our share of bureaucracy here too) and found a less oppressive atmosphere. Yes, I said OPPRESSIVE. I had forgotten how opressive the atmosphere of bureaucracy in England was until I had cause to deal with their banking system this year.
In a nutshell, I had a UK inheritance and while I was in UK earlier in the year I tried to set in motion transferring that money to my Canadian bank. It has now been 7 weeks past and today I found out (when I eventually managed to get someone to actually give me a phone number for Customer Service) that they have totally lost track of where things are at or what is happening with the account. I offered to short circuit the messy system by initiating a new transfer request and asked that they allow me to communicate by email or fax rather than by snail mail. That could apparently only be done if I established "a protocol". So, being the rational man I am I asked what that meant. Apparently it meant me giving permission to the bank to allow me to transfer my money to myself. I said "OK, let's do that right now then!" The answer was I suppose, in retrospect, quite predictable.
"Sorry sir, you have to come into your local branch (in UK) to set that up"
"But I am in bloody Vancouver!!!"
"Sorry about that sir, but that's the way we do it here."
"When I was in my local branch in March they wouldn't let me set up a protocol!"
"Sorry Sir...."
Well, yes its worse than it used to be 30 odd years ago. I suppose that this is yet another enigma. Here I am saying that we should stand on the shoulders of the experienced and look further to achieve more. I suppose that this is a really good example of what is WRONG with that hypothesis. Clearly in some cases we stand on the shoulders of the assenine and look futher into the gaping maw of despondancy and ignorance and add to the level of stupidity.
Then there is the subject of waste. (Don't you love a good rant???)
When I was a kid we had a single steel "dustbin" (garbage can for the non anglo's in the audience) which stood beside the garage and maybe every third or fourth week we would put it out for emptying. Its content included ...hmm what did it include? Largely ash from the two fireplaces as I recall. We didn't have central heating in those days. The newspapers were "recycled" by turning them into tightly wound paper spills with which to start the fire in the fireplace each morning. We were not inundated by flyers and local free "newspapers" which were really either just advertising all bundled up, or a means of delivering advertising. I seem to remember that we had chicken and fish bones in there too, and very rarely something plastic and filmy, as we didn't see much in the way of plastic because we took so-called "String bags" shopping with us. I remember when in-store plastic bags first started to appear.... Man oh man, were they a GREAT idea we thought.....yes sir, we really stood on the shoulders of great men and looked farther ahead on that one! Mind you, today they do come in really handy for picking up our doggydoo, something I remember RARELY happening in dog-loving England of the 50's and 60's. Parks were a lovely place to play on the grass in those days. Pathways were an obstacle course of small or not so small deposits. And of course English people to this day still have the disgusting habit of wearing their outside shoes inside their fully carpeted homes....but then I digress.
Milk rather strangely did not come in disposable plastic containers or waxed cardboard boxes (unless you were buying perpetual (sorry UHT) milk), but it was delivered daily to your door in glass bottles which were collected next day when the next delivery came.....we didn't call it recycling in those days... it was common sense, and quite normal.
Here in Vancouver some years ago, some almost 40 years later, we found it harder and harder to buy milk in glass bottles and had to spend a lot of time and fuel resources running to the dairy once a week, so we gave up and now we buy in 4 litre plastic jugs which we collapse (or use for bulk water storage in our earthquake preparedness area at the back of the garage) and put in the plastic blue-box for the weekly recycling exercise, and then wear as a winter sweater some months or years later.
Things sure got technical.... now we have a blue box for metals and plastics, a blue bag for newsprint (but don't you dare add non-newsprint paper to that blue bag), a yellow bag for "all other paper type waste", we still have our own composter (also known as a red-wriggler worm farm) which does an amazing job of destroying vegetative food wastes and creating a worm-mold compost for the garden. No matter how much we put in it, it never seems to get more than half full....we use public transit as much as possible to avoid putting cars on the road and carbon mon and di-oxide into the atmosphere.
But there is still a garbage problem in our lives..... despite trying to purchase responsibly (in a city environment) and putting out our triple system recycling apparatus weekly, we still find that when we put our plastic garbage bin out roughly once a month (lined of course with a plastic garbage bag to keep the bin clean), what is in there is largely chicken bones and plastic and styrofoam wrappings. Plastic is the saviour and bane of modern society.... How on earth we as a species managed to live without plastic wrapping everything not just once, but twice and thrice, and then putting it into a cardboard box which is again wrapped in plastic I just do not understand! And please do not misunderstand....I am not just describing the awful amount of processed food we are encouraged to eat, but the organic produce from the local vegetable store which is unitised and presented on foam trays and wrapped in plastic!
Young people (and old ones too)... Please protest and get smarter.... we do not need all this plastic and cardboard . No, we cannot all have a cow on the patio and no, urban chickens are not welcome everywhere.
Stop to think. It all has to go somewhere and if its not piling up in your backyard, it sure as hell is beside someone elses!
No comments:
Post a Comment