Ottawans need to find more important things to complain about | Opinion

Garbage pickup. Photo by TONY CALDWELL /POSTMEDIA

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I was in an airport restroom recently when I heard a familiar yet almost forgotten sound: “You’ve got mail!”

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Hearing the old AOL notification (made even more famous by the legendary movie of the same name with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) made me feel nostalgic for old habits that were comforting because we were used to them.

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I offer this tale by way of historical preamble to show that I have the old-person chops needed to ask that the good people of the greater Ottawa region please get a grip on themselves and stop complaining about the trash pickup schedule change and the termination of door-to-door mail delivery.

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I understand having trouble letting go of things you’re used to. But we have left the 20th century behind a long time ago already. Door-to-door mail delivery is not what it used to be, and we don’t need it anymore.

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In cities and suburbs, there is no reason or justification for paying a human being to walk up and down streets delivering flyers that wind up in the recycling bin. Community mailboxes at one end of the street are just fine, provided we make them accessible for folks in wheelchairs or other mobility devices. Easily solved.

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Because let’s get real, here. Who still gets mail they want or need? And how often? We don’t need cheques sent by mail; we have auto-deposit. Same with bills. What’s left? Christmas cards? The occasional postcard? Grandma’s handmade sweaters? That’s a lot of infrastructure for knitwear.

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Yes, rural areas are trickier. Having to travel to pick up your mail is harder on the elderly and people without vehicles. But using that to argue the whole country should keep losing money paying humans to deliver flyers to every doorstep is like keeping landlines in every office because some cottages don’t have cell service. The answer for people who genuinely lack transportation is on-demand microtransit or a subsidized taxi service, not a national postal route.

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The other thing driving me around the mailbox is people in Ottawa who complain because their trash and recycling pickup schedule changed by a day. Mine went from Thursday night to Wednesday night. Even though I was used to Thursday night and found it familiar and convenient, it took me all of one minute to update my calendar and now I love Wednesday night just as much. I’m fickle that way. Do you know that the City of Ottawa has a service where you can get a personalized reminder to put your bins out? This is a solved problem, people.

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If you’re one of the households affected by a three-week delay in pickup because of the transition, sure, it’s annoying to haul your garbage to one of the temporary drop-off sites. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s trash. It can wait, especially this time of year.

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This is reminiscent of when we introduced composting and, before that, recycling. (Hey, I warned you I was old.) People would call in to talk radio, aghast at having to fold cardboard and rinse yogourt containers, as though civilization itself was crumbling into a confused pile somewhere between the black, blue and green bins.

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Resistance to change can sometimes be charming, like when a stranger’s ringtone makes you smile in a public restroom by reminding of you a film you loved. Being upset because of slight changes in mail delivery and recycling schedules is just inane. Stop it.

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Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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