July 28th, 2009 @ kadraoui
Sir,
AS a child, I have to say, I was probably not the tidiest person you would have ever met. My bedroom was strewn with the daily debris of my disorganised life. For many years my parents thought that a bedroom floor was a mythical beast only to be found in the pages of children’s fairy tales. The room was continuously knee-deep in toys, comic books, clothes, not to mention the odd cat and dog, and anything else that I managed to drag in from outside. One day my father was more than a little annoyed when he found a sheep in my wardrobe, but in my defence, we lived on a farm and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I put him in there next to my sheepskin jacket – it seemed logical to a seven-year-old. By the time I was nine my parents had instilled in me a sense of order.
Everything had its place to where it was returned when not in use. The comics were stacked neatly on the bookcase, the clothes were either in the drawers, the wardrobe or the washing basket, and by the time I went to bed at night, the toys were back in one of the boxes on the shelf in the corner.
Even the rubbish had its own little dedicated home – a cardboard box in the corner. And, of course, the sheep were in the lower paddock, which was generally considered more of a natural environment for their physical (not to mention psychological) wellbeing. This basic discipline contributed significantly to the foundation that prepared me for the rest of my life. So it was with sadness that I read that a concept as fundamental as expecting families to place rubbish in a centralised receptacle (skip) for later collection by the authorities was being abandoned in favour of the “Leave it lying on the floor and I’ll pick it up later” variant.
While I may have thought that someone running after me picking up my rubbish was a really cool idea when I was seven, by the time I was nine I’d figured out (or at least my mother – who had four other kids to look after too – had told me) that it wasn’t the most efficient way of doing things. I work for a government department employing professional people who carry out a very critical function for this nation, and it just astounds me that these highly trained personnel do not appear capable of putting rubbish into a bin.
Each morning the car park is littered with small piles of soda cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers and burger boxes, and amazingly these piles invariable coincide with where a driver’s door would be on a parked car. Come on boys – if I can figure it out at nine …
S Eriksson
Tags: Gulf Daily News, Litter at Bay, Press