Assignment: Thoughtless Acts

Collaborators:

Assignment: Thoughtless Acts
Collaborators: agreiner

Thoughless Acts in West Berkeley

Frequenters of Bette's Diner on Fourth Street often wait more than an hour for a seat. Without any convenient place for those not yet being served to seat themselves, a nearby wall is thoughtlessly enlisted. Having sat on this same wall myself, I am intimately acquainted with its slight convexity and hard surface. A lower, flatter surface with rounded edges would provide a much more friendly perch.

Okay, this isn't West Berkeley, but it's close. El Cerrito's Pastime Hardware has no place to stack shopping carts after use. A dumpster provides a handy backstop, though. I noticed other stray carts elsewhere about the lot, always as singletons, which made me think that simply putting a "please stack carts here" sign would help in corralling them.

Basketball players at James Kenney Park hang their sweatshirts on the fenceposts. A coat rack built into the benches might be a nice alternative. I've also observed softball players to hang their backpacks on the backstop at this park. (I tried to snap a pic of that, but alas, my camera's flash card was missing that time out.) To me, the latter phenomenon suggests that backpacks that are better at standing up on their own and have a rugged bottom would be handy.

Along Hearst Avenue, jornaleros wait for the opportunity to earn a few dollars in the contracting business. The city is clearly aware of this behavior, but the only thing it seems to have done to address the problem is post a sign telling people where they can and cannot stand. This is an economic and social problem that really should be addressed more thoroughly. As a minimum, some benches would make life easier. Better yet would be some sort of system for linking workers and contractors that didn't require the workers to stand about all day. Even something as simple as a bilingual bulletin board where contractors can post the time they plan to come by would be an improvement.