DIARY
How to save money when you’re stupid
by Robert LaFrance
So the Grand
Falls courthouse is about to close – allegedly to save money. Another of those brain-dead decisions that somebody made
between breakfast and brunch without putting any thought into it.
Isn’t it amazing how, when a
government wants to ‘save’ money, it’s always at the expense of rural New
Brunswick (as non-urban areas are now called) and its workers? Contrast that
with the times that government wants to SPEND money; the bureaucrats can come
up with all kinds of creative ways to get rid of our cash. Financing cabinet
ministers’ trips (business class or higher) to the Canary Islands in February
to study their methods of making hockey pucks. You think Mike Duffy was
creative? He’s kindergarten stuff compared to a bureaucrat in full flight.
Horizon Health
CEO John McGarry, whose annual salary is in the half million dollar range, was
recently musing out loud to a Saint John audience of bigwigs that the health
authority needed to have fewer hospitals. Without naming names, he was talking
Perth-Andover, Grand Falls, etc. – any place he doesn’t live.
If I were the
head of such an organization as he is, I think I would devote a bit more of my
brain to finding other ways to save money – and I don’t mean ‘privatizing’
everything in sight. Eight or ten years ago some genius decided that taking
every hospital’s dirty laundry to Fredericton or Saint John would save
zillions. Guess what? It didn’t. The Tories, who were in power at the time, have
recently admitted it didn’t.
Instead of washing bed sheets and pillow
cases locally, you put it all in trucks and wash them somewhere else, then
drive them back. Local jobs gone, lots of fossil fuels gotten rid of, no
savings - brilliant. Did they think that laundry detergent was free in
Fredericton?
As to those space-age hospital meals,
probably the same genius decided it would save zillions more if there were a
central place for cooking hospital meals. Mmmmmm. Sounds good. Cook them in
Fredericton and ship them to Grand Falls, then reheat them. As a fairly decent
cook, I wouldn’t call that gourmet dining.
Now it’s cleaning services, in spite of
plenty of evidence that private companies neither save the government (our)
money or get bedpans cleaner.
“Bob, you’re
being sarcastic again,” said my friend Flug, reading over my shoulder as I
typed.
That hurt me. Am I not always sarcastic?
I think the
overall problem is that governments act in haste when they try impress us that
they’re saving money, but when they have a few million to hand out they plan it
more carefully. When they close a courthouse, a hospital or a school – with as
little thought as possible – they try to fool us with bogus figures that would
embarrass Donald Trump – and that’s not easy. If that comb-over doesn’t
embarrass him nothing ever will. Can he not afford a toupée?
One more comment
on this subject: Last week when I visited Fredericton for the 2015 Toad and
Fish Festival, I did walk by the Centennial Building where the government
allegedly has it offices. No one was visible through the windows. I thought:
“Doesn’t that tell a story?”
*************************
Crossing the
border, the U.S. Independence Day death in Calais, Maine, might seem like a
joke to some – a 22-year-old man put a large firecracker on top of his head,
lit it and was killed instantly – but I don’t really find it anything but a
terrible waste of a young life.
There is an Internet website devoted
to people who do really dumb things like that and end up dead. It was named in
honour of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution. The Darwin Awards
(http://darwinawards.com/) commemorate people “who improve our gene pool by
removing themselves from it.”
In 2014 two
Dutch guys who had drunk too much alcohol (should have stuck to lemonade) were
waiting at a Rotterdam intercity train station after a soccer game and made a bet with their friends that they
could lie down on the tracks and the train would safely pass over them. It
couldn’t.
In India, a
19-year-old factory worker named Maqsood, who was a bit high, was in a zoo and
wanted to have lunch with a White tiger. After being cautioned twice to not
climb over the fence enclosing the tiger enclosure, Maqsood climbed over it a
third time and then swam across the moat over to Tiger Island. The White tiger
mauled him to death and dragged the
body around the island for two hours until the animal was finally scared into a
cave and the body was retrieved.
I can only think
that those government folks who go around closing hospitals, courthouses, and
schools are of the same mental capacity as the Darwin Award winners. Too bad
about NB’s gene pool.
-end-
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