Elissa Yount: Needed for Christmas – Efficiency


Cooking our holiday favorites in 2009 is sure a lot easier than it was in 1955.

To have fresh coconut for ambrosia or cake you had to beat the daylights out of the coconut to crack it, then pry out the inside, peel it with knife, and then grate it on a grater blade and hope you did not scrape you knuckles. Today, the coconuts come with a crack in them and after heating it just a little, the inside pops right out with a tap or two from the hammer. You can use your micro-peeler to smoothly get off the outside and grate it in a flash in the food processor. This makes for a far more efficient operation and the results are better, leaving you time for other cooking.

Don’t you wish the city could become more efficient so they would have time for other cooking? It seems that from 1955 to now, the city of Henderson would have devised a more efficient and effective way to collect leaves. This has been the worse year I can remember–ever. I know we had a lot of rain, but the crews began before the leaves fell when very few people had even raked their leaves. They rode around a lot looking for piles to collect. Then there came a long lull. By last week the leaves were clogging drainage and even blocking some streets, which made for dangerous driving.

There were all kinds of excuses from the Sanitation Department, for example: “The leaves are too heavy from the rain.” Well, that must not have been the complete truth, because the truck was finally out on our street last week when the leaves had to be at their wettest, and they were picking them up just fine.

Another excuse was, “We will put you on the list.” Now, why should the city have a list? Do they collect first from the ones who complain the most? The city should have a street schedule and they should follow it daily. The city has less than 80 miles of streets, and not all of those have leaves that need to be collected. If they did just four miles per day, they could cover the city in 20 days and then cover it again in 20 more days, and they could tell people the exact day of collection. So even allowing for rain, the city could easily be covered twice in 90 days.

How much more inefficiently could they do this? Every time the truck is full, all the workers pile in for the ride to the landfill. That round trip has all the men riding and not working, except for the driver. If the city cannot find another truck so they can continue to work round-robin, then at the very least the two men not driving the truck could be cleaning the curbs, or edging the sidewalks, or clearing storm drains, or picking up trash. Beckford Drive continues to have the city workers collect litter along the sides of the road, but I have never seen this done on the east side of the tracks. Maybe this would be a more efficient use of man-hours than riding in the truck to the landfill.

In years past, the city hired temporary workers and paid them by the hour for their work. Hopefully, this is not the case today. Anyone could figure that the slower they worked, the longer they would work and get paid. There was no incentive to do the job efficiently and quickly. Getting paid by the truckload would be an incentive to do the job in a timelier manner.

The city purchased a new street sweeper some time back, and this machine has the ability to vacuum the curbs. Leaves have accumulated along curbs because the raked leaves were blown around many times. These curbs need cleaning, and that is also a part of leaf collection. In addition, the street sweeper needs to clean after the leaves are collected and continue to clean throughout the winter. Trash does not stop for cold weather.

When the city finally got around to picking up the leaves that had been raked in a pile for over six weeks, I must say they did a commendable job. But just think how much more efficiently this job could have been done. Failure to plan is a plan for failure, so before the summer is over, the city should have a new plan for collecting leaves that is both efficient and equitable.

After all, it is time for the snow to begin. I hope we do not have to call to be put on a list to have our streets scraped.