Memories of the 28th Century

Maybe it's a sign of the times that low quality seems to be what many people crave. I can't imagine Trump having been a serious contender for President a few decades ago, but he is doing remarkable well for someone who is what he is. But this post is about a few other things, as well. During the Summer, the Starbucks, where I start most days, "renovated"; that is, they removed the oak flooring and replaced it with some dung colored tile of some sort, and they hauled out the comfortable leather chairs and replaced half of them with inferior chairs. Well, a couple of days ago they got back to it, so they are renovating the restrooms, no toilet paper, no paper towels, etc., and for some reason they put the upholstered chairs out by the back door. If they had chairs and tables, then I would switch, but they have stools and things that are somewhat like tables. I wonder if they are serious. I was expressing my opinions with one of the employees, who also works part time for the town library, and I mentioned what a horrible job had been done on the sidewalk in front of the library.

The local public works department rebuilt some handicapped sidewalk ramps, and what a job they did. Someone within that last few days wrote a letter to the Hampshire Gazette suggesting that local people be used in planning and designing projects, rather than accepting bids from all and sundry. Early in the Summer the public works department redid a parking lot, new paving, curbs, etc., and when they finally finished the parking lot, about eight weeks after starting, they started on the adjacent sidewalk, which had been, but someone thought that the whole thing needed to be replaced; that took a few more weeks, and then they started on the sidewalk across the street from there. They started on sidewalks in August, and they are almost finished, but it became clear about halfway through that they intended to have an extension of the sidewalk sticking out into the street to obstruct traffic and kill some parking spaces. The sidewalks weren’t in bad shape, but someone had designed the mess, so it had to be built. The biggest problems are that the projects destroyed three parking spaces in a town where people complain about a paucity of parking, and the projections into the street will impede snow removal. I figure that the designer is from a place where snow plows are not used, Southern California maybe, or the designer is so confident that the climate will continue to recover from the Little Ice Age, so that there never will be snow in the future. I hope he’s right about climate change, but it is a gamble, and it was done with public funds, so what does the designer care?

Another matter of inferior performance being encouraged by a government agency is the problem of incompetent drivers in the local public transit authority. The local section is under contract to the University of Massachusetts, which allows only students to drive their busses. They get drivers at a rate that is lower than the rest of the world would pay, but college students are the most reliable people around. Maybe it is hoped that some of them will learn responsibility, but it is putting the people in the area at risk. I regularly get to practice letter writing, but I have to figure out who might actually act on the problems, because the university thinks their people are just fine. They usually can drive down the road, but the problems come in stopping, starting and turning. One time a higher up tried to excuse the mistake of a driver by informing me that the driver had been busy breaking another law at the time.

Private business or public agency makes no difference; inferior work has become the norm. Let's make America great again and demand superior work. Do your part by doing a good job at whatever you do, and if someone suggests that you are taking too much time, then point out that quality takes time. When you get fired, you can be confident that you were right; it's a pity that being right doesn't pay.

I recall having read something in the Discourses On the First Ten Books Of Titus Livius by Nicolo Machiavelli to the effect that when people speak of things having degenerated from earlier times, they usually are right, and things really have degenerated. Alas, I can't find the passage, but I did find a page of quotes by him, mostly from the Discourses, and That reminded me that I should reread that someday.



https://www.goodreads.com/work/quote...the-discourses