Collection Chaos

Ah, you’ve got to love our fuckwitted local authority. When it comes to bank holidays and religous festivals, this year they’ve decided to fuck about with how the rubbish collections are done – only they’ve pretty much forgotten to let their customers (i.e. the residents of the area) know what they’re doing. And they’re not even consistent on what they’re doing.

In the normal world, collections just become later by one day – so if your collection’s on a Monday, it gets collected on a Tuesday, so on and so forth. I can’t recall quite what happened for the Friday collections – I think they just did them on the Saturday instead, so everything was back in sync for the following week. Simple, easy to remember, no messing about.

But now of course, we’re in the world of alternate collections – so the council decides to fuck about with things.

In our case, (a Monday collection) it meant that our normal 6th April collection was supposed to happen two days earlier, on the preceding Saturday 4th April. Only, um, the council forgot to inform people. Oh, they put it in the local press – except that a lot of people don’t get a local paper (we haven’t received the supposedly local free paper since we moved to the village) and don’t bother with the regional EDP. The booklet with all the Bank Holiday timetable revisions came out to us on – um – 6th April.

This Monday’s (recycling) collection was supposed to happen yesterday – but being Easter Monday, they moved that forwards to today. Well, according to the booklet anyway. Only, because so many people didn’t know about last week’s collections being made at least one day earlier than usual, the council only collected from 30% of homes last week.

So they’ve changed things around again – as you can see on Breckland’s revised collection schedule here – and moved the collections two days forward. So our Monday collection now won’t be collected ’til tomorrow.  And how have they let people know about these changes? Um – they haven’t. Supposedly it’s been in the local press – except again, there’s lot of people who don’t bother. It’s not even on the front page of the council’s site – you’ve got to hunt for the bloody thing.

And even better – there’s now a knock-on effect into next week as well. So next Monday’s collection is also delayed, but this time only by one day, so it’ll get collected on Tuesday instead of Monday. Finally, the Friday collection is on a Saturday, and the world returns to normal for the end of the month.

So the supposedly “better” jiggering about that Breckland Council have done with the waste collections for Easter 2009 is actually far more invasive and confusing than the old method.

Ain’t “progress” grand?

Even be