Food for Thought #3

What is it about social justice that makes people so goddamn vague and hopelessly inefficient? Seriously, just because you have dreadlocks and a virtuous demeanour shouldn’t mean that you cannot perform simple tasks. Patchouli doesn’t decrease brain function, does it? I live near the Fair Trade Café in Glebe and it’s all “helping poor people” this and “sustainable mumbo jumbo” that, but do you think they can take a drinks order and deliver it? The short answer is “no” and the long answer is “They are so hopeless that I perceive about a 50% success rate of ordered food and drinks actually being delivered to the table. 50% may be a pass in the university grading system – hell, 45% is a pass in some instances – but writing an essay takes a lot longer than brewing a coffee. And the point of that pass grade is to acknowledge all the steps that go into the researching and writing of an essay. Most people can at least manage a discussion of the topic that reaches the word limit. It might not make a lot of sense, and they might be hopeless spellers but you can laugh to yourself when you point out to them that ‘wether’ was not picked up by their spell check because it is a kind of sheep. The coffee making equivalent of this would be a shit tasting coffee that arrived after a rather long wait. The Fair Trade norm is no coffee arriving at all, so we don’t even know if it is shit tasting or not. That is pretty bad. The only occasion that I have ever been there and they didn’t fuck it up was when I only ordered one thing. I used to think Lavender Blue was the worst and most vague service I had ever come across in a café and special forces stormed through the windows there to arrest people the other day so I wonder what is in store for the Fair Trade. Maybe through their own incompetence they will accidentally send themselves to Uganda as foreign aid… which would be a pity for the Ugandans who would probably do much better without them”.

Now that makes me think maybe the reason there is so much poverty in the world is because the poor people are being ‘helped’ by a bunch of hippie do-gooders who couldn’t organise to pour water from a boot if there were instructions on the heel. Food for thought indeed.