Thursday, 3/10

And this makes sense...how?

There's a company that picks up trash for the city of Marquette. They get paid by city water & sewer fees, as well as by the fact that we also need to buy special trash bags for our garbage to get picked up. Yet, it seems to me like the company never wants to pick up the trash or the recycling, often leaving notes & stickers for people telling them that their trash bags aren't tied the right way or that their recycling has, I dunno, two pieces of paper touching each other, which violates their rules and therefore can't be picked up.

It seems to be to be getting really bad and occasionally absurd these days. Some might even say that's a Waste.

Here's the latest example. I walked to work yesterday morning and noticed a bag of trash sitting on the snowbank in front of the station. It was from the office with whom we share the building. They put their trash out every week in a proper city bag and it gets picked up. But not this week. Nope; this week there was a note stuck on the bag saying that since it was sitting on a snowbank the company wouldn't take it. It's not like they couldn't reach the bag; after all, they had no problem reaching it to put the sticker on it.

But because it was sitting on a snowbank they wouldn't pick it up.

Now maybe there's a reason for their refusal to do the job for which they get paid. Maybe there's a safety issue, or maybe Mercury was in retrograde and they just didn't feel like. But for our neighbors there was no place else to put the bag. As I've written about in here before, there are nothing BUT snowbanks around the city. We've had a lot of snow recently, and the city hasn't been able to cut them all down. So what were our neighbors supposed to do? Wait outside holding the bag until the truck drove by and then throw it in themselves?

And what about every single other Marquette residents who may only have a snowbank in front of their home or business?

Like I said, there may be a reason for all of this. There may even be a logical reason behind all of this. But over the past several years there has been a constantly shifting set of rules as to why or why not they'll pick up the trash put out the way it's supposed to be and a constantly shifting set of rules as to what you can or can't do with your recycling. Just when you think you have it down a policy changes and you have to start figuring out what the h-e-double-hockey sticks is going on. There's no rhyme nor reason (at least that I can figure) as to what they do, just as there's no rhyme nor reason to the fact that we keep having to pay more and more for garbage service that gets more and more absurd.

None of it—absolutely none of it—make any sense. And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

(jim@wmqt.com)