"A commercial satellite owned by a U.S. company was destroyed in a collision with a defunct Russian military satellite in what NASA said was the first such accident in orbit, raising new concerns about the dangers of space debris."
Wall Street Journal, 2/12/09
Clean up, Aisle One!
Somewhere, somebody is paid real money to babysit the orbits of all kinds of stuff orbiting the Earth. Following the big bang between a U.S. communications satellite and an apparently defunct Russian Cosmos bird, it's not comforting to read where one of them started a sentence with "in retrospect...."
Now they tell us. They now think they should have seen this one coming. With stuff speeding in a circle at the rate of 17,500 miles per hour, I 'm not sure what would have been so obvious about these two particular satellites and their respective paths through the garbage.
Could it be some sort of harbinger? Of impending doom not heretofore contemplated? Who is responsible for picking up the trash in space? Is this group on the stimulus earmark list? Who pays for it? What day is "trash day" for the U.S. government??
(Chortle. The correct answer to the last question is "every day is trash day." Duh.)
I don't know if it's a metaphor for the economic climate, but in the weeks since Christmas, we've noticed erratic patterns of behavior coming from our Monday trash pick-up in Stonebury. These guys were in their orbit, without interruption for a long time. Even if we put out the trash on Sunday night, we could be certain it would sit at the curb until at least Noon the following day. Sometimes, it would sit there until 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
We were lulled into complacency. We weren't paying attention to the fact that these guys could change their routine any time they pleased, and we wouldn't have anything to say about it. That we could awake to find ourselves held hostage by the trash guys.
Sure enough, one very cold, snowy Monday morning in early January, they thought it would be fun to cruise the enclave at 8 a.m. Only those residents who left at the crack of dawn or preferred to have their barrels sit out all night in freezing weather and be coated in snow would therefore be served. The rest of us would just have to store our detritus for another week. And, they would speed through the neighborhood at warp speed, since only about every seventh or eighth house would have read the invisible memo.
Not to worry. Our neighborhood isn't known for wallflower homeowners. In fact, the collective rate of Type A behavior hasn't always been the best mix at any venue where more than one beer was served. I knew that I would not even need to pick up the phone. When I saw the truck driving by our house, I calmly walked to the garage, raised the third door, and rolled the cans out to the curb. They would be back. They would get the call from headquarters to take another twirl through Stonebury.
Sure enough, they were back in the neighborhood at their normal Noon time to take another tour around our circle. Through our space. All the cans that weren't at the curb at 8 a.m. had migrated at their usual pace, many of them completely oblivious to the fact that at least one, but more likely, multiple residents had raised their voices in united opposition to this show of arrogance by the "WM" Waste Management crew.
Since then, they appear on Monday across a newly-lax timeframe of somewhere between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. I got the message. I don't wait to get those cans to the curb now, under threat of having to keep anything I don't want anymore for one more day.
Trash day used to be one of my favorite days of the week. It still is, mostly. But, I've noticed that the guys on the truck have found new ways to express their displeasure about how the neighborhood brought them back into line.
They now throw lids and cans helter-skelter after they empty them, as if the cans themselves had anything to say about it. If trash doesn't fall into their truck while they're emptying the cans, they just leave it on the ground.
The last time this happened, I thought about all the people who would love to have their jobs right now. To have the security from knowing that trash is constant, never in short supply. To know that their jobs are completely safe. Because, no matter what other belt-tightening might occur in households around the community, HOA dues are non-negotiable, along with the trash pick-up part of the tab, along with the contract to WM.
Well, that last part might change. I recently learned that some effort is afoot in Highlands Ranch to permit homeowners to make changes to their existing trash service. I don't know if anything will really change, but it does seem that this particular group of guys should probably clean up their act. Turns out they might not be so indispensable after all.
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