HSB 2018
The weather was perfect. The music was great (at the stage or two I could hear). And, best of all, the plan I came up with, the day after the 2017 event, to handle load-out at Arrow worked perfectly.
Friday and Saturday went smoothly, aside from our losing one worker to a gopher hole, and several others to reasons. One new person was supposed to work with me to be trained but, before we could even start, decided this wasn’t for her and quit.
Sunday was just the perfect greening day. I went through three rolls of compost bags (30 bags I think) plus a number of heavier clear plastic bags for really heavy food vendor compost loads. Besides keeping the vendors in order, I also was able, with one assistant, to keep the entire west end of Hellman Hollow in order all day. We were even able to take down the two busy mega-stations (four compost, four recycling, two landfill cans each) directly in front of vendor row. This means that virtually all the waste from the field was properly sorted and bagged.
Last year I was surprised by the vendors loading-out immediately after the concert ended, instead of the following day. All our eco-stations were surrounded by vendor gear ready to be loaded into trucks so that no one could get to them. I finally just left because there was nothing more I could do. But my clever plan for this year was to move all our stations across the cart path at 6pm, before they started disassembling their tents. By the time we returned from shutting down the mega-stations, after 7pm, the vendor trash was beginning to come in. They didn’t like having to carry bags or cans a little further, but the new station locations stayed clear and usable. By the time the trucks came in to load up all the gear we had sorted and bagged virtually everything. We were gone by 9pm, though the loading-out was still in progress. The only real problem we experienced was because I wasn’t given gear I had requested.
Which is not to suggest that the vendors were at all helpful. They sorted almost nothing themselves. Working with food vendors is like working with that guy in the movie “Memento,” no matter how often you tell them where something goes, a few minutes later they’ve “forgotten.” This is really only a problem for me on the rare occasions when they contribute waste to our stations -- usually they use the cans inside their tents. It becomes a problem for me when I can’t grab and sort their cans before they decide to dump them randomly in our stations.
I thought I had seen it all, in terms of bad vendor behavior, but this year I saw something new. In our “lingo” a “vendor bag” is a garbage bag, usually black, filled with a near perfect blend of compost, recycling, and compost. The compost, while mixed throughout, often is mostly at the bottom of the bag because it’s heavy and slippery. One of my vendors was producing perfect vendor bags only they were, for a reason I couldn’t determine, in green compost bags instead of the usual black bags. Compost bags are both more expensive and more likely to tear (or compost) so this makes no sense.
The sheer volume of food that gets thrown away at an event like this would be shocking if I weren’t so used to it. We ended up with a stack of unopened boxes of pizza crust. Both this Friday (the first day with the smallest attendance) and Friday 2017 we had to deal with an entire garbage can full of excess paella. (This is where the small toters I had requested would have been invaluable.)
I think this is the first year that I have no plans for improving things next year. Everything (under my control) went as well as it could have. Okay, I thought of one thing. If I had thought to bring enough cash, I would have taken a taxi home Sunday night instead of letting Muni dump on me. Earlier in the Summer, this occurred to me and I planed to do it, but forgot and didn’t remember until I was waiting for the bus that never came. I should write that down now before I forget.
Random
Random 2
Today I received a postcard offering to pay cash to buy my condo. I don’t want to sell, and they couldn’t buy it even if I wanted to sell it to them, but what interested me was the cursive typeface used on the postcard. It is really convincing. There are multiple versions of the same letter, like “i,” depending on what character comes before. So it has to use code to translate text into what looks like cursive handwriting. I can imagine how it works, but I’ve never seen anything so convincing before. I can also imagine how I would write the code to do an even more convincing version where you would “randomly” pick from several options for each letter in every context. I put “randomly” in quotes because “true” randomness is hard, or impossible, to manage on a computer. But this is actually a meaninglessly fine distinction that only annoying people pay attention to. Still, I would include some debugging code to show what “random” was generating to make sure it wasn’t obviously failing. Says the person who hasn’t written a line of code since the ‘90s.
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