Happy Birthday!

To archangelbeth
who's fault it is that I found alt.callahans and LiveJournal. Without her, I wouldn't know any of you folks.

Wasting My Time.

Not me. Other people. Far too many people are inconsiderate jerks who don't even stop to think about how their actions might impact on others. Here's my little daily grind. A very small thing, but a constant annoyance.

I get to work a little before 6 A.M. every day. Working right on the loading dock most of the time, I am naturally concerned that everything there operate smoothly since it reduces my own aggravation.
So every morning, I arrive to find that the local distributor has left the usual twelve bundles of Wall Street Journals outside. Each bundle jad thirty-five papers in it - and the WSJ is not a skinny paper. My trained guess is thirty to forty pounds per bundle. Not huge - I move stuff for a living.

However, more often than not, these twelve bundles are piled in the loading area directly in front of our primary dock. If/when a truck pulls up, which can happen at any time, it will run over these papers. Unless someone moves them first.

Consideration. It sure isn't the job of any of the drivers making deliveries to our hall to clear the dock. It's mine. So before I even punch in, I have to take a couple of minutes to haul the damn things out of the way of the trucks.

I work in the dining hall. These papers go to the bookstore in the student union building. We happen to be connected and share the loading dock. I've mentioned the recurring problem to the guy who comes down to get the papers and he's complained to the distributor repeatedly. So far, no joy.

The worst part is, only about half of those papers will ever get sold. The rest pile up (in a corner of the already crowded loading dock) until they get shipped off for recycling. You see, the Wall Street Journal charges its advertisers according to how many papers they ship out which is theoretically based on the number of subscriptions they have. However, half of those subscriptions are read over the Web. About three-hundred papers a day printed and shipped out just at our University for no good reason. Except to make extra work for me while making extra money for them. Multiply that by the rest of the country! No wonder the world is running out of forests.