When you mix business with government, you don't improve either one.
Around mid-December, our town's contract with a garbage collection company ran out. The company that has had the contract for decades lost the bid. So before the end of December, they started hauling off the dumpsters around town.
The new company wasn't supposed to start collecting trash until mid-January.
So, we were without any trash collection for 2 weeks. The new company did put a large bin on the town's lot (where the water towers and other town utilities are) for people to use. I stashed my trash in my shed.
When we finally got a new dumpster, after being without one for over 2 weeks, instead of placing it in the ugly scar where the old one had sat for decades, they carefully placed it underneath the guy-wires of a utility pole, about a dozen or so feet away. Where, conveniently, the truck can't lift and dump the dumpster without hitting the wires. So they don't.
Total incompetence.
This means, we have a dumpster, but it is overflowing and hasn't been dumped since it was placed there. The others down the alley have been dumped twice. I'm using them, but my irresponsible neighbors will just keep piling trash on top of the dumpster. I know because it's what they always do. Often, they don't even bother to bag it. Then it falls off/out and no one will pick it up if I don't. Including the dirty toilet paper they dump loose in-- or on-- the dumpster. (OK, maybe you can't flush it for some reason, but put it in a tied bag!)
Back when I lived in a different state there was no monopoly on trash collection. I hired my own trash collector. If they missed my house, I could call and they'd come back and get it, and they'd apologize.
With this company only answering to the town government, they don't care. The government doesn't care. Yet, we are still forced to keep paying the fee for the service we aren't getting-- for more than a month now.
Yeah, I'm irritated over it. If I were this incompetent I'd have to pay a price.
UPDATE 1-31-2023: They moved it late this morning and used a backhoe to press down the trash so it didn't stick up. I guess enough people complained. It was the town that moved it, not the trash collector-- I'm sure they weren't going to travel 90 miles one-way to move a dumpster. I also think it was the town which placed the dumpster in the wrong spot to begin with. I had tried to walk the dumpster out from under the guy-wires the first time it got skipped, but it was too heavy to budge. Couldn't even rock it.
The fact that government will NEVER be competent because it's not motivated to be competent, since it gets its revenue at the point of a gun, once understood becomes incredibly obvious, yet the notion seems strangely elusive to many.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing scarier than an incompetent government is a competent one.
DeleteTrue. A competent government (assuming for the sake of argument that one could exist) would waste less money, but would use the resulting advantage to more effectively subjugate and kill normal people.
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