Kite Fest 2018
I have been thinking about what I’m calling Golden Cynicism, a personal philosophy based on Golden Retrievers specifically. The Greek Cynics used dogs as a standard for living a good, simple life, and that’s fine, so far as it went, but now we have Golden Retrievers.
If we modeled our behavior on the Golden Retriever we would be much happier and less judgmental. Apparently. So I’m trying to apply this while dealing with the public, and especially the food vendors, at our greening events. Mostly it’s working. I was in a better mood and gave out fewer dirty looks on Saturday. I did have to take a mental health break toward the end of the day after the second person had thrown a diaper into the compost I was carting around, but I often forget to take my breaks so this was, in its way, a good thing. And I didn’t throw the diaper at the person, which is what we all really want to do. “Baby steps” is, I believe, a popular way to describe this degree of progress.
Unfortunately there was a little setback at the end of the day involving a food vendor (surprise). There were two food vendors generating particularly heavy compost. The oyster guy and the fruit guy. The fruit guy in particular was leaving overly heavy plastic bags of fruit trimmings. It was a problem for us and for them. So I found them a green, rigid plastic, container to hold the trimmings and lined it with a bag because that can be useful even when you just dump the container. At the end of the day, I was amazed (which is kind of cute really) to discover that they had removed the heavy bag and set it on the ground for us to deal with. For just an instant I was an angry wiener dog, giving them the stink-eye and barking out, I mean pointing out how this creates a problem for people who are not them.
The next day I worked the Art and Soul Festival in Oakland instead, so we will never know how my tentative plan to set their tent on fire if they did that again would have played out.
Perhaps I just haven’t thought the Golden Cynic thing through all the way. Perhaps next time I will be able to just smile through an episode like this and think, “Well, of course this is what they will do.” And then, after they’re gone, come back and piss on their tent and take a dump where they have to walk.
As an organization we’ve had a lot of turnover since last year and there were mostly new people working on Saturday, and the crew chief had never worked the event before, so I got to play my second role of walking institutional memory. I let her know that we didn’t usually put eco-stations at the more remote seating areas of the park -- too far to walk and they don’t get used anyway; and impressed on her the importance of used cooking oil disposal. This had blown up two years before, was addressed last year, and then nearly forgotten again. It’s in our contract and some of the food vendors know this. The crew chief was then able to save oil containers on Saturday and rent a truck for Sunday to haul the oil away. Problem averted before anyone noticed.
What’s especially interesting about the above is that the only reason I was working that day was that my boss, as often happens about this time of the busy season, spaced-out on posting notices for future events and by the time I knew Art And Soul was up, there were no Saturday shifts I wanted. So when she finally posted Kite Fest, I jumped on it.
Art and Soul 2018
James was puzzled that I was working as early a shift as I was, but it was really perfect. I had time to go around and fix some problems (put bags in a couple eco-stations his guys had forgotten) and to sort the carts (what Oakland calls toters) positioned behind all the food vendors before the event really got going. I would have liked to have stayed another half hour to finish sorting the vendor bags at the end -- but that assumes they would give us all the bags promptly, which is not always the case. But I had time to show one of our new workers how I handle the vendor bags, so I’m sure she was able to handle it.
The worst part was all the food we were throwing into compost. There were entire trays of prepared macaroni and cheese or of egg salad that we had to scoop out and dump because it’s hard to find a home for things like that at 8pm on a Sunday. Entire unopened bags of produce had to be cut open and dumped for the same reason. And then there was the chicken. I’ve become numb to this, but my coworker was appalled by the number of chickens represented by the cooked but unsold meat we were tossing into the compost. It turned out we were both veggies, but that doesn’t make you feel all that much better about this. And the aluminum trays all this food has been cooked in are so soiled they can’t even be recycled, so they have to go into the landfill. (Finding a way to wash these trays and other food containers is something we think about, but if you’ve ever washed dishes in a professional kitchen, as I have, you know this is not a trivial task.)
And, of course, most of the food vendors saw the three cart eco-stations behind their tents merely as the place to dump their bags of unsorted trash. Hence our end of the event sorting work that shouldn’t have been necessary.
But fewer diapers; and none thrown into compost I was actually carting around; and, thanks to the dedicated compost carts, no super heavy bags of compost. (Some pretty heavy mixed bags, but I’m trying to forget about those.)
Walking to lunch
The next step up is to have the spigot under a locked plate in the sidewalk. The building on the corner of Stockton and Bush (that recently completed a seismic retrofit like ours) has one of these, and it even has this really cool armored hose. Not sure if the hose retracts into the sidewalk -- which sounds like it would be just asking for repair problems -- of if you have to bring it out and connect it. Either option would be nice.
Then, a few more blocks down Bush, I finally came upon the workmen grinding our sidewalks. I’ve been seeing the results of this work all over the neighborhood and was wondering how they were doing it -- big, hand grinders. It’s really brilliant, instead of uneven pavement sections being jackhammered up and replaced, they just grind down the raised edges. Bonus: This gives the ground down sections the appearance of terrazzo. This is one of the best ideas I’ve seen the City implement in a very long time.
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