Beatles Vs Stones.

I have a book called Beatles vs Stones, but this post is unrelated to that book.

The post also has nothing to do with Biscayne Park.

This post is about two, or possibly three, or perhaps four, songs.  One is the Stones' song "You Can't Always Get What You Want," (although I could equally well have gone with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction") and the other is either the Beatles' cover of the Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford song ("Money, (That's What I Want)"), or the Pink Floyd song "Money."  But because the book exists, and I have a copy of it, I thought it would be cuter to call this post "Beatles vs Stones" than to call it Stones and Pink Floyd.  And it's all British Invasion, except for the original of the Beatles cover, which was written by the Motown originator.  Oh, well...

So this started when I got to the Ft Lauderdale airport too early today -- for a small collection of reasons -- and I suddenly, as the Brits would say, came over all peckish.  I needed something to eat, and I wanted decaf coffee to go with it.

I bypassed Jack Nicklaus' restaurant, because it looked too slick, and I went next door to a place which I think was called Heavenly Grounds.  I asked for their (overpriced, of course) "breakfast sandwich," and a large, black decaf.  How a place that has the name Grounds in the title, strongly suggesting that coffee is an important item they sell, doesn't sell decaf -- "not in the airport," for who can possibly imagine what reason -- was completely beyond me.  So I canceled the order, and decided to go to Nicklaus'.

The second piece of bad news -- the first having been that it looked too slick to begin with -- was that I couldn't see the menu by focusing my camera phone on the two-dimensional bar code.  It didn't work.  But a waitress, who may already have known this doesn't really work, came by very quickly with a physical menu, and there were two things I was willing to buy.  One was a shockingly overpriced "breakfast burrito," which cost $13.62, and the other was coffee.   Only one price was listed for the coffee, so I figured they just keep refilling your cup, as normal restaurants do.  So OK, I was hungry enough to eat a $13.62 breakfast burrito, however big that was going to turn out to be, and I ordered that and decaf.  At this point, I was seated at a table, which was more formal than I wanted.

What?!  Again they don't serve decaf?!  So does this mean you can't get decaf at Ft Lauderdale airport?  I need to talk to someone about this.  But by this time, I was about as hungry as I was frustrated, and I decided just to get my overpriced, and probably too large, breakfast burrito.  OK, fine, that and a glass of water.

If they had charged 1/3 the price they did, it might have been a fair price.  Since it was the airport, which is always rip-off city, food-wise, they might have charged 1/2 of what they did.  But that puny little thing, and most certainly not what anyone who's ever eaten one would call a particularly good breakfast burrito, for $13.62?  And up to $17.02, by the time they demand an 18% tip, and tax?

The Stones' song says that you sometimes get what you need.  Not this time.  And Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd sure were right about the focus on taking people's money.

The New Bosses Are Not the Same as the Old Bosses.

A friend and BP resident told me about his experience with leaving out yard waste.  It's not a happy story.

In the old days, with the old contractor, if you left out more than an estimated two cubic yards, someone would take a photograph of your estimated excessive leavings, the refuse would be picked up the next day or so, and you would be billed for the estimated overage.  That is apparently not the new deal.

Now, my friend said, he left out what was estimated to be more than two cubic yards, he received a notice of a $50 fine, and he had to move all the yard waste back behind the house.  No one picked it up, and no one was going to.  Pick up the yard waste, as is the contractor's job, estimate how much more than two cubic yards it was, and the homeowner can argue if he thinks someone overestimated?  Evidently not.  And this is for substantially more money than we were paying about two months ago.

Someone does not have much of a sense of courtesy, or even decency, when dealing with BP residents/homeowners/taxpayers.  We're now paying significantly more money for inferior and punitive, instead of helpful, or even accommodating, service.

"Great Waste," indeed.

PS: I don't know how to check this story without either simply believing that what my friend told me is true (which I do believe), or butting in to someone else's business, which I'm not going to do.  I was just told this story in passing, and I said I would blog about it.  My friend did not ask me to do that, nor did he request that I not do it.  We've fallen far from the WastePro days, and it's costing us a premium to take the bumpy and injurious ride.

PPS: I urged my friend to go talk to Mario Diaz, who I hope will see to it at least that the $50 slap in the face goes away.  This is not $50 to take away the yard waste.  It's not $50 to take away more than the contracted amount of yard waste.  It's a $50 punishment, for nothing, and with no adaptive component.  And if matters could be made any worse, it appears to be our own Village that is punishing us.  Great Waste had no reason to punish anyone.  They just kept driving, and had less work to do.

I'm Reminded of the Old Days, When I Used to Watch Television.

It was way back when the little mobile phones -- maybe the flip phones, or maybe before that -- were becoming popular, and there was what was understood to be a holdout demographic: men, and especially manly men, and tough guys.  So, there was an advertisement that featured a middle-aged man driving a pickup truck, and wearing a cowboy hat, and speaking with what I vaguely recall was a southern accent, and using a mobile phone.  If this was good enough for him, and he approved and saw value in it, then it was good enough for anyone.

Now, there's this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/telling-conservatives-its-a-shot-to-restore-our-freedoms-how-online-ads-are-promoting-coronavirus-vaccination/ar-AANGLpc?li=BBnb7Kz

It's very hard to understand the coronavirus vaccine holdouts.  They make their reasons clear -- there is no coronavirus, or it's all a government plot/hoax, or it's the fault of the Chinese, or the vaccine isn't proven enough, or the vaccine is dangerous -- but these reasons are entirely invented, and they don't make sense.

The whole matter, which is a medical problem, has bizarrely been politicized.  It's said to have economic consequences, which it does, but it's simply not political.  And the people who invent this interpretation -- that the government shouldn't tell people what to do -- do not advocate for the removal of speed limits and STOP signs and red lights and seat belt laws, which also represent the government telling people what to do.  For their, you know, safety.

So, it's all pretty insane.

The fact is that everyone should get vaccinated.  Everyone should.  Did you get DPT and polio vaccines when you were a kid?  They were required for you to go to school.  Do you think your parents were communists or idiots for doing this to you, or alternatively, are you glad you didn't get diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, or polio?

Just get vaccinated.  Don't be foolish.  This problem has been going on for the past year and a half, and it's now getting worse, with the surge almost entirely in unvaccinated people.  Some of them wind up sick, in the hospital, in the ICU, on a ventilator, and now, they want to get vaccinated.  They can't get vaccinated when they're that sick, and it's too late to request it.

Please do yourself, and everyone else, a favor, and get vaccinated.

A Waste?

In 2013, we had garbage and/or recycling trucks on the road five days a week.  I don't remember what we were paying, but despite paying our Village PW sanitation employees less than poverty-level wages, we were paying somewhere, I think, in the $500s per residential unit per year.  It was never explained why Village PW employees who were being underpaid weren't complaining, but we had to do something.  We had three garbage trucks, one of which was inoperable and not salvageable, and another of which was intermittent, and held together with spit and scotch tape, and employees who were not reliable to come to work, pulling other PW employees off other Village responsibilities, and whatever we could do to keep this "system" working was going to cost a good deal of money.  We were going to have to buy new trucks (even the most consistently reliable one was old and leaking), and hire more employees, and, if we cared about our own employees, we were going to have to pay them more.  The loose estimate at the time was that we would wind up paying in the $700s or more per residential unit.

So in 2014, we outsourced.  We were careful to find what we thought was the best outsource contractor, and one of our requirements was that they agree to offer full time jobs to all of our current employees.  Which they did.  And which would have been for higher wages.  And which, inexplicably, none of our PW sanitation employees accepted.  But we wound up with trucks on our roads three days a week, instead of five, and we were paying in the low $400s per residential unit.  And we restabilized our PW department.

Except some Village residents were bereft, and complained, and once we hit 2017, and the then Commission didn't care about anything, including trying to improve service, it deteriorated.  And once the contract with that contractor ended, and the then Commission still didn't care about anything, we just started with contract extensions, each for more money than the last.

We reached about $485 per residential unit, with deteriorating service, and no one to work with/on our contractor, so the newest Commission and manager decided to find someone else.  That someone else is Great Waste and Recycling Service.  They started at the beginning of last month.

So now, we're up to four days a week of trucks on the roads, and $659.49 per residential unit.  That's $178 per unit more than we were paying before July 1 of this year.  A residential unit is your single family house, or each side of a duplex, or each apartment in an apartment building.

We appear to have undone more or less all the good we did in 2014, and increased prices very considerably.