More Rubbish

One of the many jobs I did in the late 90s was to drive a furniture lorry. I passed my driving test in the 70s, and my licence allowed me to drive any vehicle up to 7 1/2 ton without any extra training. These days you have to go on a training course.

The lorry was fitted with a tachometer and it was a job to remember to fit a disc and then set it correctly. I've lost count of the times I drove miles while it was set for a mealbreak, or took a break while it was set to drive. The discs were stacked up in the despatch office and I never saw anyone ever look at them.

Two or three times a week I'd deliver furniture around the area. I had a mate who'd help me carry the items into the houses, and we had fun getting overstuffed sofas through narrow doors. Sometimes we had to take the doors off, or remove front windows. I noticed that the newer houses were much smaller than the old ones, and a suite of furniture that looked nice on the showroom floor would completely fill a living room. There was room for a sofa, one armchair and a TV set. Maybe that's all people need these days.

When people bought beds we'd offer to take the old one away. It cut out the hassle of getting the council to collect it, and cut down on the amount of fly tipping.We'd take the beds and suites back to the yard and stack them up. When we had a lorry load we'd take them to the tip.

These old beds and sofas were classified as trade waste and had to be taken to a depot in Northampton where there was a weighbridge. I spent a couple of hours loading old saggy, wet and mouldy beds and sofas into the van. There was a certain amount of covered storage at the yard, but the other staff wouldn't be bothered to stack the beds under the shelter but just leave them where they fell. Once I'd loaded up I'd drive the fifteen miles or more to Northampton and I'd pass these enormous open top container lorries heading in the opposite direction.
Upon arrival at the Waste Transfer Station (to give it its proper title) I'd get the vehicle weighed and drive up the ramp to unload in a cavernous dusty and smelly building. I'd back up to the heap of rubbish and throw all the beds and sofas out. A large digger would drive up and flatten everything and then scoop it up and drop it down a chute into the lorry waiting below.
I then returned to the weighbridge to be weighed again, this time empty (plus me in the cab of course) and then they'd charge me for the difference in weight. Once I'd settled up, I'd then drive back, following the lorry that now contained all the crushed bedding that I'd unloaded.

So why couldn't I just drive the bedding to the landfill site instead of a pointless thirty mile round trip? There's a weighbridge at the landfill site and both sites were operated by the same company.
Whether the beds were collected by me, collected by the council or flytipped, the probability is overwhelming that they'd have ended up in the same landfill site eventually.
There's money to be made from rubbish. All those road miles moving the rubbish around may be bad for the environment, but they're good for business.

A dozen or more years later and the fleet of lorries still travel between Northampton and the landfill site near Corby. They use a different route these days but I still recognise the vehicle livery and the huge trailers that look like forty foot containers with the roof sliced off. They pass close to a windfarm the receives subsidies whether the wind blows or not (it seldom does. It's estimated that the farm is no more than 7% efficient). Plans for an electricity generator powered by burning rubbish keep getting turned down on environmental grounds.
Any methane gas that is given off by the tons of rotting matter in the landfill is burnt off rather than collected and used to generate electricty.

It's all rubbish really.

Rubbish

When I was temping a dozen or so years ago I was happy to take any job offered. Some weeks I could only work for a couple of days due to my music commitments, so I was happy to take the odd one or two day assignments.
One May Bank Holiday I was asked to do a day working on the Domestic Refuse Collection at the basic minimum wage, but at double time for a Bank Holiday otherwise I'd have turned it down. It was hard and heavy manual work for someone in his late forties, but I gave it a go.
I turned up bright and early at the Council Depot, climbed into the Refuse lorry and we drove to a neighbouring town where we were to do our round. There were three of us, the driver and two mates who worked on opposite sides of the street. You've all seen how they do it. It's quite hard and there's a knack in getting the bin onto the hoist and then getting the empties away. The lorry is constantly moving and you have to watch out for traffic. You very rarely sit in the lorry and you're always on the go. I wouldn't want to do the job for minimum wage.
We drove up and down the streets which were quiet as it was a Bank Holiday. As we drove down one street in a rough part of town a man came out of a house, saw me and started effing and blinding "Who you looking at? I'll smash your face in", etc etc. Charming man, charming neighbourhood.
After an hour or two the lorry was full so we climbed in and drove off to the tip. This journey comprised my morning break. We returned to carry on the round and filled the lorry twice more before we finished the round in the early afternoon.
I politely turned down other offers of odd days on the bins at single time. The job is worth more than that.

A few months later I was offered a couple of days work at the landfill site that we'd dumped the household refuse. It had been very windy and paper and other rubbish had escaped the netting surrounding the tip and had to be picked up. So I spent a couple of days litter picking from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. I turned up at the gatehouse and they gave me a roll of black bags and told to get on with it. The netting that surrounds the tip is very good at catching any paper or plastic that blows around, but if too much sticks to the netting the net becomes a wall and the rubbish is lifted over the netting, so the first priority was to clear the netting. Pick the rubbish off the net, put it into a black bag. When the bag is full, drop it into the tip. Repeat until all the rubbish is collected. Once that was done I cleared all the rubbish inside the boundary of the tip, then all the fields around the tip for a quarter of a mile or so.

Plastic takes forever to degrade. There's a wood a short distance from my house that is the site of an ironstone quarry. The overburden (the soil and rock that covers the iron ore) was removed with a mechanical shovel and tipped so that it formed ridges and valleys known as hill and dale. These were planted with trees and the gullet was eventually filled with household refuse. It's possible to walk through the woods and see the site of the gullet, and also see old washing up liquid bottles sticking out of the ground and showing no signs of decomposing

I spent a couple of days clearing old plastic bags from the fields and hedges, enjoying the open air and being inspired to write a song or two. The only downside was the fact that my trusty Doc Martens finally gave out and began to leak water after a year of hard use, in factories and three months walking the streets pushing charity bags through letterboxes (but that's another story)

The driver of the Refuse lorry told me that when this landfill tip was opened it had enough capacity for over thirty year's worth of domestic rubbish. It had been in use for just over fifteen years and was almost full, such was the increase in the local population and the amount of rubbish they were throwing away.

Since then the council has introduced a two weekly refuse collection and recycling for domestic customers. We're quite happy to sort out our rubbish, with different bins for garden and household waste, and boxes for glass, paper, metal and plastic containers. What I'm less happy about is this.

I'm responsible for making sure my firm's rubbish is collected. It's a small firm with only a few staff, but even so we can produce a lot of cardboard and waste paper, drinks cans etc. I called the Council to ask if they had any facility to separate the recycleable stuff from the rest of the rubbish. They said that hadn't and had no plans to extend recycling to business customers.
Our business rubbish is collected in blue plastic bags that currently cost about £1.60 each. If I separate out the recyclable items I'm left with one or two blue bags that we have to leave out overnight as the binmen go by before the office opens. At the moment we don't have an urban fox problem and the rats are well fed from the rubbish left outside the many takeaways at the end of the street.

I can see the benefit of recycling. I've worked as a binman and I've worked in the landfill site. I'm happy to separate my household rubbish so that the council can sell the cardboard, cans and paper to offset the cost of landfill.
What I don't understand is why the council can't or won't extend the recycling scheme to their business customers.
I suspect that it's more to do with taking money from businesses than recycling.

World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.

Trolley pushing

I went shopping in Morrisons for the first time in months (due to being housebound with my leukaemia). Seeing the lads and one girl pushing snakes of trolleys back to the trolley park reminded me of a time 33 years ago when I did just that.
I was working at Tesco Weston Favell. At that time it was the biggest supermarket in the country. People would travel from all over the county and from as far away as Milton Keynes to do their shopping. We had over 30 checkouts and at times every one was busy, with long queues at every till. This meant that we were always out of trolleys.
I had a small team of lads and our job was to keep the trolleys moving back to the trolley park in the entrance. When it was really busy we'd wait while a customer unloaded their trolley into their car and almost snatch it out of their hands, such was the demand for trolleys. We had one goods/passenger lift that would take twenty trolleys and many times I'd ride up the lift, open the doors and twenty or thirty shoppers would descend on the left, take the trolleys and rush into the store. We hardly ever had to empty the lift! It didn't matter how many trolleys we had, there were never enough. We had a team with a van and trailer touring the local estates rescuing trolleys from alleyways and ponds, and we had a contractor come in every couple of months to repair the trolleys and steam clean the really dirty ones.
Like the time a woman left her young child to soil itself while sitting on the baby seat. It was everywhere. On the mesh, on the floor. As we rushed over with a mop and bucket she never batted an eyelid, just scooped the child up, left everything and went and got another trolley and started again.
There's an art to pushing a row of trolleys, especially when the ground slopes as it did under the Weston Favell Centre. It was possible to push twenty trolleys without them breaking away if you kept them pointing upslope slightly. Once you were at full speed, a flick of the wrist would point the trolleys downhill onto a ramp up the kerb. You soon learned when to stop pushing so that the row of trolleys would stop just in front of the lift. We were out in all weathers, and apart from one or two very lazy lads who's rather argue than push a trolley, we kept the trolleys rolling, and thereby kept the tills ringing.
Now that every town has two or three supermarkets we will never see the levels of business that we had back in the seventies and eighties.
When we lived in Somerset our nearest Tesco was either Bristol or Yeovil. Now there are Tescos is Shepton Mallet where we lived, and in Wells where I worked.
In the early eighties the nearest cashpoint was in Bath, more than 30 miles away. Now even our local newsagent has a cashpoint machine.
The banks have closed branches everywhere. There will come a time when banks will be as rare as cashpoint machines were in the 80s.

We seem oblivious to one consequence. Every cashpoint machine has contributed to the loss of a person's job.
However, they'll always need someone to push the trolleys.

The Net Book Agreement

One of the many temp jobs I did was at a local print works about ten or so years ago. They needed some extra pairs of hands with a huge print run of magazines. It was all very clean, light and airy and the work wasn't too strenuous. Pick this up, put it there, and so on. There were frequent stops while they worked on the machines and our small gang of temps were moved around the works as required. All in all an interesting couple of days for a couple of reasons.
It wouldn't have happened at all a few years before that. The printing trade was 100% unionised and any non-union labour would have had them out on strike. We can all remember the scenes in Wapping when News International moved production of their papers out of Fleet St.

I drove past the site of the print works the other day. It is no more. The buildings are demolished and the concrete floor is a car park for the local hospital workforce. The other printworks where the local paper was edited and printed was knocked down about fifteen years ago and production transferred to Northampton. It's inevitable that that print works will also close as more and more people get their news on-line rather than from a newspaper.

I thought about this as I was browsing Ebay looking for books by a particular author. This week it's Kurt Vonnegut. I have a dozen or so and I'm looking for more of his books to take on holiday. As I browsed the lists I thought about the Net Book Agreement, which was in force when I managed Volume One Books in Northampton twenty years ago.

According to Wikipedia
"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed Book Price between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.
It came into effect on January 1, 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question.
In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers."

I was made redundant in 1994 when the Goldsteins foresaw the end of the NBA and put the company into administration. The new owners and I didn't see eye to eye about how the books were ordered, etc and I was made redundant. I was happy to go. Within a few months the Net Book Agreement was no more and Sunday Trading had been forced through. My employment contract would have been changed for the worst. I was glad to go.

I was a firm believer in the Net Book Agreement. Books are not baked beans. You don't read your Dan Brown or Nick Hornby or whatever your favourite author happens to be, and then pop down the supermarket for another one. Each book is unique. They take time to write. The most prolific authors only manage about three every two years. They are a premium product.

So why pile them high and sell them cheap? Why reduce your margin and even sell them at a loss? Waterstones opened at midnight to sell Harry Potter at half RRP.
Two things. Either the RRP was wrong or they sold it at a loss. All that work , all that expense, all that aggro and they sell it at a loss. They're mad.
Secondly, the books were printed in China and shipped over by the container load.
Hardly any books are printed in the UK now. Since the NBA was scrapped the publishers can't afford to. So all those printer's jobs are gone forever. When they close the print works or shoe factories the machines aren't scrapped. They're sold, boxed up and sent to factories in the far East where they are used to print books or make shoes that are sold back to us.

Cheapest is dearest. Always.