THE BUS STOPS HERE
Pleasant encounters a welcome reminder that public service survives
My computer faces an east window. So at 6:30 a.m., Sunday,
July 30, I could not help but notice the rising sun's bright orange colouring in a solidly grey sky, the consequence of this summer's widespread wildfires.
Having a poor sense of smell, this hasn't bothered me directly, although scientists warn the micro-organisms hitching rides on the charred carbon and water vapour in the smoke can cause harmful coccidioidomycosis (a.k.a. “Valley Fever”).
July started with a bang. On July 6, a pleasant lady from Service Canada called to remind me I hadn't filed my 2020 income taxes. I had it done and got two surprises. It cost me less than I expected and I was getting money back for the first time in years! Then, when I phoned the Canada Revenue Agency to make them aware, I got to talk to another pleasant and helpful public servant.
The next Saturday morning, I realized I had only $5 in my wallet. I had to get some moolah from my bank's ATM. This means taking a bus to midtown, getting off and crossing the street to my bank. I felt my pocket and my wallet was gone. I knew I had it because I had shown the driver my bus pass (the price of which doubled last year).
As my bus pulled away, I took note of its number. Another bus was sitting across the street at a bus stop, so I asked its driver to call the office and ask that the driver be informed. I went home and cancelled my bank card.
I wouldn't get a replacement in the mail for 10 days and still needed cash. So off to the bank I went, where I explained the problem and within minutes, I walked away with enough cash to tide me over. No doubt, the fact I'm a regular and they know me by name facilitated things, but I wonder how an online banking aficionado might have fared?
On Monday, I had to phone the city's 311 help line to connect me with the bus company's lost and found, and once again the person answering was pleasant and helpful, telling me my wallet had been turned in that morning. And my fiver was still in it.
It was so nice to experience first-hand that the spirit of public service is not yet altogether extinct!
In a previous column, I commented on the near-space plans of Messrs. Branson and Bezos, noting the Bezos vehicle would have a crew of three, the brothers Bezos and the 82-year-old female aviation industry veteran Wally Funk, whose ticket had cost her US$28M at auction. But that information turned out to be partly flawed: On July 20, the Bezos crew numbered four, not three, and she had not coughed up the US$28M.
On July 15, Blue Origin, Bezos's space company, announced Oliver Daemen, a then-18-yearold Dutchman, whose wealthy father had bought him the ticket from the original buyer who had encountered “a scheduling conflict” (or got cold feet?), would join the other three.
I have long been “from Missouri” on space exploration.
The money and human ingenuity required might have served humankind better if spent on down-to-earth undertakings of direct benefit to the world's general population.
One consequence of space exploration, similar to the effects resulting from Edmund Hillary's and Tenzing Norgay's conquest of Mount Everest in 1953, has created a third dimension to humanity's fouling of the universe by turning space into a garbage dump.
Two-thousand “active” and 3,000 “dead” satellites, along with 8,000 tons of other “space junk” now orbit the Earth, and the U.S. Space Surveillance Network routinely tracks the 14,000 “large” pieces of space debris among the hundreds of thousands of pieces of junk that have collected since the flight of Sputnik 1 in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's mission in 1961. “Debris avoidance manoeuvres” by active satellites are now a routine occurrence.
This latest “variant” of our space exploration is likely to become an aspect of mindless, hedonistic consumerism by the idle obscenely rich. We might be better off minding the message from the 1759 book Candide, written three decades before the French Revolution by Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), which satirizes the reactionary leitmotif of the then idle rich — “Since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose,” therefore “Il faut cultiver son jardin” (One should tend to his garden) closer to home.