if I ran the city...the series, #1

I'm not going to keep it all inside any longer; I'm not going to pester my wife with it; I'm not going to announce my latest revelation or pithy epiphany at the next social gathering; I'm going to dump it on the blog, and hope the process has a salutary effect, and for all. I'm going to tell you what I would do, if I ran the city, and the county, and the state.

Today, I would do away with the gas or electric blower as a maintenance tool for all government workers, and replace it with a broom and a shovel. I would then auction the collected blowers to some benighted, less progressive government entity as far away from here as possible--perhaps another third-world country.

The blower costs a lot and merely moves trash from one location to another, sort of like other cost shifting and responsibility shifting and wiping off the booger that goes on at all levels of government today. Nothing is ever really resolved, trash never gets picked up, containerized, and transported to a centrally located place where people deal with the issue of what is the highest and best use of trash. Trash "blowerized" becomes the neighbors' problem, and a blower, despite the costs, doesn't have a whole lot of alternative uses.

Brooms and shovels, on the other hand, are inexpensive, have no serial number, can be used any number of ways both indoors and out, and seem to sharpen eye-hand coordination while providing a modest aerobic workout.

To those efficiency experts who might talk of productivity and man-hours and such, using a blower may be more efficient in concept, but the practical executions I have seen allow the marginally supervised to run around, look busy for a brief moment, and then have more leisure time to smoke and joke.

Am I missing anything, as I run the city?

Hey, at least I'm doing something.