Soapbox: Community Calendar
Okay, I haven't done a soapbox post in quite awhile and I'm annoyed enough at the moment to go another.
I live in small town Iowa. Every spring and fall the city has a "clean-up" day where you can set all kinds of crap on the curb without the appropriate stickers and the city will pick it up free of charge. Correspondingly, every spring and fall I'm trying to figure out the date so I can prepare adequately and yet usually don't figure out the event until I see massive amounts of trash appearing on people's curbs. I know that the spring clean-up date is coming up within the next four weeks and I searched both the city's events list and the chamber of commerce calendar for clues but didn't see any indication that it had been scheduled. So...I emailed the chamber of commerce about it. The mystery is solved. Apparently it is entirely possible that the day has been scheduled, but the city withholds that information until the week prior to the clean-up event so that residents don't put out stuff too early.
I'm trying to find the logic in this.
Individuals, such as myself, who are already planning their weekends into the month of May cannot find the date for the spring clean-up. So, in an effort to be prepared, we start piling up crap weeks in advance and hope that we don't miss the notification of when we should put it out on the curb. Some may even go ahead and put it on the curb and this would explain why I see the piles at the end of March that linger there for weeks. No matter what, you're going to have people putting out their items early. Just publish the damn date and let me schedule my weekends accordingly! Sheesh!
1 comment:
We get notice of the date in our water bill I think several weeks in advance. They ask that we don't put things out until the week before and most people listen. But it is nice to have the advance warning so I can stack the curb items in my garage ready to go. It also allows it to set by the curb the full week so people can pick through it for their hidden treasure. In the last three years, less than 10% of what I put out remains for the city crew to pick up. The other 90% finds new homes and that it the best part of the entire thing.
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