Garbage and How it Gets Into The Truck

While sitting here in my house on this relatively mild Tuesday, with the wind blowing outside, I had a thought.

Today is trash collection day for many of my neighbors. The garbage trucks from the four commercial companies that service my little neighborhood here in Western Michigan are all privately owned, contracted by property owners, not a governmental agency ... and are operated by one man.

He (they are all males) drives, manipulates several levers that control various mechanical arms that extend, grab the can (all of which are provided to the customer, so they are all exactly alike) lift it, empty it, return it to the ground, and then retract. The whole process takes seconds and the driver moves on to the next house. The driver is not subjected to any physical strain at all.

On the other hand...

While I was spending a lovely month with my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, I noticed the garbage trucks there are operated by THREE people...one driver and two others who dismount as the truck nears its goal. These trucks are operated by a governmental agency and the driver and workers are employees of that agency.

When they arrive at a house, one or both of them lug one or more cans to the back, and then EITHER...

operate a control that hooks an arm to the can, lifts it and dumps the contents into the back, then lowered to be lugged back to the lawn by one of the workers OR... (and this is mostly what I observed)

...the workers lug the cans to each side of the rear repository at the rear of the truck and manually lift the cans (hopefully, though hardly ever, using legs and good body mechanics to lift; mostly, they use youthful arm and shoulder and back muscles) dump it, and either lugs it back (if it is large enough with wheels, say) or just throws it in the direction of the lawn.

Those guys probably do not last long in such a physically-demanding profession and I bet the company's workman's compensation premiums and claims are sky-high, to say nothing of the fact that forking out payroll, compensation, and benefits for THREE employees per truck as opposed to one must cost the government agency a ton in tax revenues.

One would think they would see a good way to cut costs.

Values, Beliefs, and Behavior

How do they relate to each other, if at all? It is simple and not so much.

Values  +  Beliefs  =  Behavior

Know a person's motivations in the context of their values and beliefs and you will better understand the "why?" of behavior. This understanding is critical in our world today as politicians seem to become more and more populist and less and less moderate. They speak for and to a smaller and smaller but more vocal segment of society with harsher and shriller words. WHY they do what they do is a function of the equation.

Values govern behavior; it is the motivation for our actions.

Beliefs are how we express our values to ourselves and to others, how we operate them.

When you understand the concept of how they work together, you will understand human behavior better than 90% of the world's population.

Think about that the next time you are angry at the Trumps or Le Pens or Putins of the world's governments. It might help keep your angst and blood pressure down a bit.

What 'The West Wing' Taught Me

I have done it. I have made it through seven, 22-episode seasons of one of the best television shows ever made.

Two, four-year terms of the Bartlett Administration are in the books. The president contracted MS. The actor that played Chief of Staff Leo McGarry died during the filming of Season 7, thus changing the arc of the show, I am sure. Charley came up from almost nothing, dated the president's daughter, then got early-admission to law school.

And somehow, I survived, relatively unscathed.

I have learned some other things:

• I thought I had already seen all the seasons. Not so. There is much I missed in the last three years. 
• The horrible effects of MS appear to peak then diminish as ones presidential terms come to an end. Probably for dramatic impact, maybe. 
• Apparently, being selfish, self-centered, unable to manage personal relationships, and being a completely ego-maniacal spoiled brat is not an impediment to success, even advancement, in the White House. Oh, wait... 
• Also apparent is the decisional conflict one has to make at the end of eight years between two more years helping an inexperienced president's staff learn their ropes or heading up a $10 billion fund to pave roads in Africa to facilitate getting life-saving medicine and food to starving people. (P.S. That would be after already having spent eight long, tough years in the White House, after having been plucked from obscurity and moving on up to become the Chief of Staff to the president. 
• And the last thing I learned was this: when they left for the last time, not once did POTUS or anyone in his family thank their Secret Service detail for SAVING THEIR LIVES. I hope real presidential families are not like that. 

It is now on to other endeavors for me.

A child's memory of school, foreign service style

I was a quiet kid, the oldest of five children. Unlike my two brothers and my two sisters, I had a room to myself. I was the oldest; thus, I was given the honor of sitting on the right side of my father at one end of the dinner table. My mother sat at the other end.

After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, my father went to college on the GI Bill, against the wishes of his father, an English immigrant who believed that staying in their hometown of Wilton, New Hampshire, and taking "a good job" at one of the Sam Abbott-owned mills in town was the way to support his growing family.

• As an aside, the Abbott family was one of the wealthy business families who supported hundreds of European immigrant families in southern New Hampshire to work in the textile industry. My paternal grandparents both worked in the Abbott Worsted Mill that made fancy men's fabric (for customers such as Brooks Brothers) and my maternal grandparents worked in the Abbott Machine Shop.

After developing a successful career as a teacher - he started in a one-room schoolhouse in Greenfield, New Hampshire - and eventually working his way up to vice-principal, principal, assistant superintendent, then superintendent of various school districts while completing a Masters degree from Boston University and being accepted into Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, he went to work for the U.S. State Department in what was first the International Cooperation Administration's Operations Mission in Amman, Jordan, in 1959. Two years later, ICA's Operations Missions combined with other U.S. governmental foreign assistance organizations to become the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, under President John F. Kennedy, whose international visions and outreach created USAID and the Peace Corps.

My Dad completed his doctoral work at Harvard while working on creating a university system for teachers in Jordan where there had been none before. The reason my Dad stayed in Jordan as long as he did - normal tours would be four years, two, 2-year tours - was at King Hussein's specific request to the U. S. Secretary of State.

Being a youngster growing up and going to elementary school in Amman, Jordan, was an interesting time of my life. At first, there was no formal 'schoolhouse,' as such. The young students, all children of Embassy personnel, were schooled in a vacant house rented by the government. The teachers were wives of the Embassy men; some were trained teachers, most were not, and all used the Calvert System for texts and lesson plans.

Every Monday, the students would go to school and find their Calvert boxes on the tables. These boxes contained the week's assignments and materials, including any new textbooks, the dreaded 'blue books' - those little books in which our assignments and homework were written to be returned to Calvert for recording and grading (Calvert was an approved school based in Maryland, near the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., and was geared to American students in remote countries around the world long before distance-learning schools became popular.) The boxes included everything we needed as students and teachers, including scratch paper, pencils, and rulers.

I still have a clear memory of the excitement of opening my "Calvert box," as they were known.

I Did It

I bought two items on Amazon.com today, a waffle maker and a toaster. First, let me tell you about the waffle maker.

The unit I have is a rotating Belgium waffle maker made in China by Oster. 'Rotating' means the unit turns after the batter has been put inside. Think hotel breakfast style waffles. A Belgian waffle is a thick waffle with much deeper holes than a conventional waffle; the person making the waffle can put things like fruit or chocolate chips in the batter more easily with less 'stickage' to the plates. A Belgian waffle maker is not really what I wanted since I don't add anything to the waffles except butter and syrup. Plus, I bought it when I first moved here a decade ago for probably less than $20. I do not use it very often, probably two or three times a year.

This morning, while making waffles with the top open to remove the finished round waffle, it tipped over, something it has never done before. Trying to right a tipped-over, hot waffle maker, while holding a finished waffle in one hand made me realize that, since it was getting old and starting to fight me and never really made the waffles I wanted, I decided it needed to go to Goodwill.

It was then I started considering the toaster, too.

I have owned the toaster for a very long time; in fact, it was made in the USA and you know how long ago anything was made in the USA, right? But the heating elements were going bad, so I was getting almost burnt-undone differences on my bread and that just is not okay. I like bread and I like toast; I want my toast to be properly toasted, a simple task at which my current Cuisinart unit was failing.

While checking around, I learned the only toasters made in the USA these days are $1,200 commercial toasters. I don't think I need that...but it would have been nice. There is a company (one person, really) in New York who refurbishes very old USA-made toasters and resells them...for prices starting at about $250-$300. One can buy a pretty good foreign-made toaster for that much.

My search then went to Amazon.com, my primary source for "things." It was there I found and bought a new waffle maker and a new toaster. After spending some time considering things like style and price, I made my choices and punched the keys to buy them.

The toaster has been replaced by a 2-slot new unit from Cuisinart, my favorite kitchen small appliance maker, and a new regular, square waffle maker from someone else...Cuisinart has a good unit for $85 and I just couldn't see spending that much. (Famous last words?)

I then spent the better part of two hours cleaning the two units. The waffle maker has a noticeable amount of oil residue and the toaster has cooked-on burn spots, so both of them went into the sink, into the water - I know what you are thinking, that one should not submerge an electrical unit in water, but that only applies if one plans on using it soon. I do not and I plan on letting them sit on their shelves for a week or more to dry out before shipping to Goodwill using my favorite GiveBackBox.com.

So my replacement kitchen appliances arrive Tuesday and I will check out the result. Hopefully, I will get better waffles and great toast. Perhaps the greatest, most beautiful toast anyone has ever seen.

Oh, wait. Those are someone else's words...