Ranting again

Darkness falls so fast these days. I got in a good solid day at the site today, but I didn't have time yesterday to tidy up the stack of branches I had cut up or the wood Sammy had chopped, so I was out in the beam from the sensor light clambering over the pile to gather up wood for the evenings warmth. Trees are a very simple form of solar battery, storing the energy of five or ten years for us to use in a few hours. How can one not be frightened of the current system of burning the solar power stored over a positively geological period of time and releasing all the eons of carbon back into the environment while chopping down the forests that might fix it back in the earth. Being that a lot of kids these days can't even hold a pencil properly let alone manipulate a pair of chop sticks I wonder how many know that every single scrap of energy they use except the stuff from uranium comes from our nearest star. There are a lot of things to learn, but that should be pretty high on the list.
This rant is indirectly related to my encounter with bureaucracy today. I spotted some cardboard tubes from rolls of carpet or lino in a skip outside the city office and I popped in to ask if I could have a couple. I walked to the skip with the guy I asked as he didn't know what I meant. He said it wasn't their skip it belonged to people working inside. He called another man who said the same thing and also that they should cover the skip (presumably to stop people like me asking for stuff). This man in turn called another man who told me he would have to contact the people doing the work making it soun like they were in a different city. I asked if he could give me a couple of tubes and I would give him my contact details if there was a problem. Then he said well they are working on the second floor, so up we went, but the guys there said they had no skip, it belonged to the blokes working up on the roof. We went to the roof and there were the men I needed to see. They said "Dozo", which means go ahead. So I took some of the fresher looking tubes they had just relieved of their lino and saved them the trouble of carrying them down to the skip.
I think there used to be people who could say "Dozo" without having to ask five others in such an obvious case. Not anymore, my tax money is needed to employ people with no decision making power at all. As a parting shot my guide through the bureaumaze told me that if I had any of the tube bits left after I had used what I needed I must take full responsibility for disposing of them myself and not bring them back. I had not even thought of that as an alternative, so it was interesting to have this final glimpse into the realm of the super ridiculous before mounting my vehicle and returning to the real world.
I didn't get any tea in that little break from work, but I did get the sense that something of an entertaining show had been put on for me. The serious side to this is that none of the bureaumongers had a mobile number for the workers on the roof, or the sense to use it if they did, so in the likely event of an earthquake they would not have been able to confirm their safety. Mind you, the chaps with the helmets on looked a lot more able to handle adversity than the men with the pens in their pockets.