4 – Hours to notice an apparently out-of-place car parked in our neighbourhood.
72 – Hours to feel confident that it truly is out of place.
2 – Hours to connect with relevant neighbours to confirm the car’s out-of-placeness.
1 – Hour for designated neighbour to report the car to the Police, to communicate their answer to other neighbours (Yeah, it was a car-of-interest in an investigation but not any longer. Call Bylaw.), and to call Bylaw.
24 – Hours for Bylaw to ticket the car, necessary before towing.
1 – Hour for second neighbour to contact Bylaw again after noticing the first ticket.
4 – Hours for someone to remove the car.
Four plus two plus two plus one plus 4 plus one plus four, carry the 1, and yes, it’s official: A car that took less than an hour to abandon took more than 100 elapsed hours to remove.
Of course that 1:100 ratio overstates the differential between problem-causing time and problem-fixing time. Our small neighbourhood cadre wasn’t actively working on the problem for all of those 100+ hours: for most of it we were monitoring the situation (Is this really a problem?) and then we were waiting for Bylaw officers to have time to attend to this non-urgent situation. So, active work-time for us, Police, and Bylaw, including to-and-fro travel time for the latter? I dunno. Three hours? Likely. On the other hand, it didn’t take a whole hour to dump the car, either. If we assume that was a half-hour task (allowing travel time – even car-abandoners need to get to and from the job-site), that would give us a 1:6 ratio, significantly better than the original estimate. Whew.
But still: one to six. This, as they say, is why we can’t have nice things. If it takes us six times as long to deal with an abandoned car as it did to abandon it, our only hope for society is that for every car-abandoner there are at least six normally engaged citizens. It’s easy to see how this could get out of hand pretty quickly.
While we’re considering societal problems, we’d do well to remember that most of them aren’t as simple to correct as an abandoned car. I’m loath to characterize kids as problems, but the same ratio challenge applies when it’s much easier to create demand than it is to provide supply.
There’s no escaping the lag effect, as it takes longer to build a school for 600 kids than it does to bring 600 kids into Alberta, whether from another province or another country. – National Post
Maybe we can sort problems by their cause:fix ratios. Where that’s an unhappy number, we’d do well to put some significant energy into prevention.
It takes less time to cause trouble than to mend it. Someone should be working that concept into a dozen nursery rhymes. Humpty Dumpty and “All for the want of a horse shoe nail,” are the only ones that come to mind that strike that note. However, it is the theme of all our lives, one way or another. I shudder to think of the math riding on my back!
Laurna – When I think about it a bit, I suspect this is what is meant by entropy – the tendency of ordered systems to decay, unless they have an external input of energy. Not sure we can sell many t-shirts with that message: Entropy: It takes 30 minutes to abandon a car and 180 to get it towed. But we could definitely work on the nursery rhyme. 🙂
You sure are troopers. Thank goodness you are willing to hang in there!
Tom
Tom – 🙂 At a certain point it becomes a challenge, you know?
Isabel – yes it took more than 100 hours of elapsed time to get that car removed. However, you need to factor in the time Bylaw took to process the request and the tow truck driver’s time to respond, to cite just a couple of other possible time wasters.
If you are feeling really generous, you could also factor in the owner’s time it took to recover the vehicle from the impound lot.
Then you’ll have a more accurate picture of the time wasted by that one abandoned vehicle.
Just saying.
John – Entropy is nasty. 🙂