This post is based on a story by OMG (old mustached German).
He's back, for all those of you who missed the insights during our great Snowden rants and poking fun at friendly intelligence agencies. The rants had some readers, yes, and the poking worked well.
Anyhow, with the first crocuses of spring, OMG stopped by for some "Springtime for OMG and Germany", minus the singing, as he insisted on seeing added to the post.
OMG dismissed the big military crises of the day, Russian aggression and the idiots of ISIS, with a single remark: Look, Russia cannot fight an extensive non-nuclear war, and ISIS only became big because 100 000 Iraqis ran, it will be over pretty soon unless some player has an interest in making them last.
It was yellow trash day, meaning plastic and metal consumer goods packages were collected in yellow plastic bags, flimsy like hell for cursory inspection of content - and for eternal annoyance when, not if, one of them ruptured due to overstuffing or bean can lid cuts,
OMG went: You wanna hear a fun story about trash and the art of war?
Sure.
In the 1980s, my very much younger self was assigned to a new post, not long before the camp got a new general. He was a bright, feared smooth operator, his best buddy was the then West German defense secretary, such a good buddy that he would chopper in over the weekend for a beer and some R&R. One of the first new policies of the general was a strict recycling policy. Yellow trash for plastics and cans, blue for paper, grey for classic garbage.
Within a week of the announcement, bins in these colors appeared everywhere. If I'm not mistaken, a bunch of press photographers came with the bins to document this first ever installation-wide step towards a green future.
Sounds nice to me.
It was. Had you been there, you would have heard and seen all the arguments and debates that come with any institutional change. The trash cans were a brilliant example of change management, and those who misplaced trash and were caught did get a stern talking to.
The man became a media prince, and the troops rallied behind him as the success became known. But...
Yes....
What do you think was the problem, if I tell you there was one big problem?
I don't know, I don't see an obvious one. Maybe some issue with the recycling capacities, we've seen that in many countries that introduced trash separation?
Close enough, but closer to home: The local waste management company was neither equipped nor organized for the new process. So, every week when they picked up the trash, the workers would empty the yellow, the blue, and the grey bins into one and the same truck, happily mixing the materials again, then carting them off to the landfill.
So he failed?
No, he succeeded, actually. It took the waste management folks about a year, after several of the towns around the base instituted the same collection policy, to get the pick-up sorted out.
Did the media report on that?
Of course not, who would have told them? The base logistics officer wouldn't want to look like a fool or diss the boss, the press officer knew better, too.
We are glad OMG is back and look forward to more stories over the summer.
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