civil servants
Nov. 15th, 2005 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupToday's high point was the garbagemen being willing to take away the trash can of tree branches I left out front. The garbagemen here are incredibly picky. If you tied something up the wrong way, or they don't like how you mashed a box into the paper recycling, they will just not bother to take it. They also have this thing in New England where you can't use black trash bags for yard waste for some reason -- I'm sure it's some good Environmentally Responsible reason -- necessitating multiple hours of trying to jam thousands of leaves and twigs and grass into paper bags with narrow necks. So getting the branches taken away is a small victory, even though it's maybe a twentieth of the total volume of tree branches I have behind the garage. There are a lot of trees in this neighborhood and they all overhang my yard.
Next we have the mail carriers, who vary from day to day when the mail comes to our house. Some days at 9 am, some days at 6 pm. As an idiot, this provides me with a whole day's worth of pointless procrastination, going down to "check the mail" and cursing when there isn't any. Today there's one small junk post card in the mailbox. Is it today's mail or yesterday's that I missed grabbing from the box? The possibilities are truly mind-blowing.
The police. We're in week three of not answering when "Unidentified" comes up on the caller ID. At this point in the year the Providence Police or somesuch calls and they make clear right away that they have your address in front of them. Would you like to support them? Not really, but I don't like saying no to a cop who has my address. So I say yes and they say we will come around to your house to pick up the check. Then they don't come the next day so I bring in the check, then they come and the check is not there, etc. But now I am ducking the STATE Fraternal Order of Police, who actually sent me something to mail in, but we are a little light of wallet right now, and it is starting to piss me off on principle. So not answering the phone is easier than writing the check.
But my point is, what a goddam racket, literally, the police have with this. Do you not want to pay your protection money? Just look for the spray-painted "X" on your door the next time you're burglarized...
Now, the librarians. I know I venture into dangerous territory with this since so many of my readers are members of the librarian mafia. But the library near our house, which used to have a wonderful assortment of toy houses, blocks, and people, just decided one day to not have them any more. This basically destroys our ability to ever use the library, since all that Mini-Me can do there now is pick up books from the giant vat of books and bring to me to read. And because the vat of books is board books for one-year-olds, they are retarded. "Stars! Sun! Boat! Duck!" etc. This is just a little tedious. It would be nice to perhaps read her more age-appropriate books, which I can't do because I can't look at them unencumbered by her, which is something I used to be able to do, once upon a time when they had TOYS ...
The Mrs. wrote an irate letter to the dink at the library who took the toys away and the inevitable letter back was full of bullshit about how the toys would spread the flu (as opposed to the board books) and the kids using them are noisy (as opposed to the whooping teenagers). Very typical bureaucratic mindset. "This annoys me for some half-baked reason and I have the power to make it go away, so fuck you." The playgroup mothers say they will write more letters, but this is the wrong approach. What they need to do is all come to the library at once and have their kids running around and screaming for an hour, which is too bad, perhaps if they had some GOD DAMN TOYS TO PLAY WITH they wouldn't make so much noise. And then do this every day for a week. And then call the newspaper and television people. Because that is the only thing these little jerks will understand.
Now it is you-all's duty to remind me that kids are objectively annoying to everyone else and unfortunately you know all it takes is one bad apple to screw up the barrel and so on. I know all of that. But you get the illusion in your head that because you pay taxes and you go to the library all the time, somehow the institution will respond to you.
I mean, this is why people become libertarians, for fuck's sake.
Next we have the mail carriers, who vary from day to day when the mail comes to our house. Some days at 9 am, some days at 6 pm. As an idiot, this provides me with a whole day's worth of pointless procrastination, going down to "check the mail" and cursing when there isn't any. Today there's one small junk post card in the mailbox. Is it today's mail or yesterday's that I missed grabbing from the box? The possibilities are truly mind-blowing.
The police. We're in week three of not answering when "Unidentified" comes up on the caller ID. At this point in the year the Providence Police or somesuch calls and they make clear right away that they have your address in front of them. Would you like to support them? Not really, but I don't like saying no to a cop who has my address. So I say yes and they say we will come around to your house to pick up the check. Then they don't come the next day so I bring in the check, then they come and the check is not there, etc. But now I am ducking the STATE Fraternal Order of Police, who actually sent me something to mail in, but we are a little light of wallet right now, and it is starting to piss me off on principle. So not answering the phone is easier than writing the check.
But my point is, what a goddam racket, literally, the police have with this. Do you not want to pay your protection money? Just look for the spray-painted "X" on your door the next time you're burglarized...
Now, the librarians. I know I venture into dangerous territory with this since so many of my readers are members of the librarian mafia. But the library near our house, which used to have a wonderful assortment of toy houses, blocks, and people, just decided one day to not have them any more. This basically destroys our ability to ever use the library, since all that Mini-Me can do there now is pick up books from the giant vat of books and bring to me to read. And because the vat of books is board books for one-year-olds, they are retarded. "Stars! Sun! Boat! Duck!" etc. This is just a little tedious. It would be nice to perhaps read her more age-appropriate books, which I can't do because I can't look at them unencumbered by her, which is something I used to be able to do, once upon a time when they had TOYS ...
The Mrs. wrote an irate letter to the dink at the library who took the toys away and the inevitable letter back was full of bullshit about how the toys would spread the flu (as opposed to the board books) and the kids using them are noisy (as opposed to the whooping teenagers). Very typical bureaucratic mindset. "This annoys me for some half-baked reason and I have the power to make it go away, so fuck you." The playgroup mothers say they will write more letters, but this is the wrong approach. What they need to do is all come to the library at once and have their kids running around and screaming for an hour, which is too bad, perhaps if they had some GOD DAMN TOYS TO PLAY WITH they wouldn't make so much noise. And then do this every day for a week. And then call the newspaper and television people. Because that is the only thing these little jerks will understand.
Now it is you-all's duty to remind me that kids are objectively annoying to everyone else and unfortunately you know all it takes is one bad apple to screw up the barrel and so on. I know all of that. But you get the illusion in your head that because you pay taxes and you go to the library all the time, somehow the institution will respond to you.
I mean, this is why people become libertarians, for fuck's sake.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-15 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-15 11:55 pm (UTC)Adults are objectively annoying too. Maybe we should ban them from the library.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-16 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-16 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-16 06:10 pm (UTC)Heroes, my ass...
Date: 2005-11-16 06:13 pm (UTC)Of course, the Police are fucking cowards. I thought I would shy away from this opinion as I got older, but now that I live in Tucson where the criminals practically advertise themselves in the papers, and the borders are effectively wide open to drug-traffickers (despite a TEN FOLD increase in Border Patrol Police in the last ten years), I am firmly convinced that the Police are entirely corrupt. From top to bottom, a lazy pack of corrupt swine.
I mean, if dying in the line of duty is the standard by which we judge heroism, then qwik-e-mart clerks and garbagemen are the true heores. And they are, actually, doing a thankless job for little pay.
In LA the Libraries are Public Babysitting sites first, Public Internet Portals second, homeless shelters third, and way in the back somewhere, behind the magazines, there might be a book or two.
Re: Heroes, my ass...
Date: 2005-11-17 01:13 am (UTC)We used to go camping at Catoctin National Forest, in Maryland. There was this great waterfall you could go swimming in, and people all over the rocks. Then we came one year and there were big signs and fences saying to keep off the rocks. I know (without being told) that some peanut-headed idiot fell to his death, and that Ruined It for everyone else. But it just pisses me off that the rules work like that. Shit gets ruined for me because of the collision of bureaucrats and idiots, of which I am neither.
Re: Heroes, my ass...
Date: 2005-11-17 02:42 am (UTC)Like the guy next door who has this monstrously loud truck... he wakes up at 4:30 in the morning and starts his truck, and revs it and revs it. Then he takes off, squealing tires (at 4:45 am) and blasts off. I can tell how far he is away by how many times he comes to a stop. The blocks are a half mile long here. So, I hear him blare for a block, then for another block, then for a third, then even a fourth usually. This means that he is at least two miles away and I can clearly make out his truck from inside my bedroom. This asshole must awaken literally thousands of people every day.
Why is he allowed to do this?
Yet, if I were to change lanes without signalling on an abandoned road at 4:30 am, whammo... the cops would be right there.
I don't see what this has to do with what you were talking about, except for this: The world is set up for idiots and morons. There are so many of them, that everything caters to them, and therefore all energy is directed toward pleasing idiots. This is what Capitalism does. It makes the world safe for fucking MORONS.
and cowardly scumbag crooked cops go after people who are easy targets, because the scumsucking police fuckheads are all sociopaths themselves... and if there is one consistent facet of sociopathic behavior it is this: prey on the weak. Cops don't go after criminals, they team up with criminals to prey on victims. Because they are corrupt scum fuckers.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-18 05:11 am (UTC)