No Parking Space Parking

I work for a big company here in Brazil. We have large parking lots. They are far from being the best parking lots in the world, but they can currently hold the cars from all the company's employees that want to drive their cars to work everyday.

Parking space is not really a problem. There are spaces for everybody. But sometimes you will look for a good parking space and will realize that the best you can find is still a little bit far from your entrance gate, which is also not a problem, because the company provides buses to and from the parking lots, so their valuable, yet lazy employees don't even have to walk to get to their workplaces. Quite convenient, but there is always someone to make us angry...

As I said, the parking lot has problems. It does not have decent pavement. In fact I would say it does not have pavement at all. It doesn't have delimited parking space either. Having parking spaces marked on the ground would really help, but would not solve the problem I am going to describe. The other big parking lot (on the right side of the picture above) has marked parking spaces and still has similar problems.

The little thing that makes me angry is parking where there is no parking space. People have this amazing ability of finding places to park their cars where no one is ever supposed to park. And sometimes it is so obvious that it is a wrong place that I just had to write this post.

We have lanes marked on the parking lot that are designated for pedestrians. They are clearly marked with a "pedestrian" icon all along the path. Everybody knows it is pedestrians' space. But bad parkers insist on parking there. Everyday.

Poor pedestrian, has been just ran over...

Not only on the pedestrian lane, but also in the middle of the street...

On Fridays the problem gets worse because more people drive their cars to work in order to travel to their hometowns right after work. And again, the problem is not that there is no space for them to park. They just want to park closer to the gate. And they will park wherever their car fits. WHEREVER.

For God's sake, this guy parked INSIDE the bus stop!!

The Company has tried to educate irregular drivers by leaving notices on the windshields, but that doesn't seem to help much. Applying monetary fines could help, but I am not sure they are allowed by law to do that. Maybe locking the wheels of the car, forcing them to get back inside the facility and go to a building on the other end of the property just to release the car would help... If they are minimally intelligent, they will realize it would be better to park regularly and walk a few additional hundred meters in the morning than spending more time and walking more in the afternoon when they are in a hurry to hit the road...

What hapenned to real food?

This is my first food-related article on LTTMMA. Yeah, I wrote about chewing gum some weeks ago, but I really do not consider the topic "Gum in the urinal" a real culinary post... I am a kind of a food-label-addict. I have always been and I always read them all, most of the time looking for ingredients and nutrition facts. It got a bit worse when we had our first daughter that had (and still has) some food allergies and that makes us always look for the "bad" ingredients.

Then I was thinking about why engineers were introduced to the food industry. They should not. Engineers are all about reducing cost, improving processes, reducing production cycles. Sometimes, those are things we wouldn't like to imagine applied to that food-making corporation we always loved and trusted.

I'll start with mayonnaise. I can't find real mayonnaise anywhere in Brazil. It is impossible. Not a single manufacturer makes real mayonnaise here anymore. Hellmann's, a world-wide trusted brand (owned by Unilever), doesn't taste the way it used to. Because they decided to add the so-called "modified corn starch" to the recipe, to grow it at a low cost. The only modified-corn-starch-free mayonnaise I can get is Wal*Mart's Great Value mayonnaise, because it is made in Argentina. It is very good, indeed. In the US you can still find the traditional Hellmann's that they now label as "real mayonnaise". What?! You change all the recipes and now sell "real mayonnaise" at a premium price? They will even stamp "reduced fat" on the "new mayonnaise"! Great! Damn you, food engineer.

Another good example is ice cream. It also doesn't taste like it used to. I do not live in a major brazilian city and it is hard for me to find good ice cream around here. The best I can get is imported Häagen-Dazs, which is still really good (and pricey), at the local Wal*Mart. We can't get good ice cream such as Blue Bell, Ciao Bella or UDF Homemade. All we get everywhere is Kibon (Unilever), Nestlé and some other local, bad brands. They've always put hydrogenated fat on ice cream, but they are adding more and more of it each year. As you may already know, ice cream is normally sold by volume, not by weight. Surprisingly enough, year after year, the 2 liter ice cream box seems to weight a little less. And why? Because it has more fat and because it has more air bubbles. Brilliant! It now tastes like margarine, but this is not a problem, right? Damn you, food engineer.

Finally, we also used to have a decent peanut butter, called Amendocrem. It think it was made by Visconti, a fairly trusted maker. They sold it to someone else (I think it was Claybom, a margarine brand formerly owned by Unilever) that sold it to Fugini, that currently holds the brand. It is now anything but peanut butter. It has peanuts, but has tons of fat and sugar and additives. It is definitely not peanut butter when you compare it to Smucker's, for example. I could continue writing about other items, all ruined by those damn food engineers...

I think we should take all engineers out of the food industry. And, of course, keep cooks away from designing bridges, buildings and computers. Doesn't it make sense?

Bad Use of Low-Cost Postage

Brazilian postal service (Correios), one of the few things run by the brazilian government that works really well, offers a low-cost postage alternative, called "carta social" (word-by-word translation would read "social letter"). The "carta social", as per the Correios website, is "a postal service offered by Correios to facilitate the access to the postal services for those from the less favoured social classes of the Brazilian population.". It has some requirements, such as the need to be always hand-written, always be addressed to and from an individual, among others, but it is not like the similar product offered by the USPS called Nonprofit Mail, which requires a formal approval from the USPS. Here, anyone can just label an envelope "carta social" and pay one cent (R$ 0.01) for the postage, as a symbolic rate. Quite fair for a company run by the government, right? The government has the obligation to offer such a service.

The problem is that there is always someone that thinks the goverment is hiding the low-cost postage from the population just because they don't want all the population to know they can send a letter for just a penny. And I think they do, in a sense. No matter how much you emphasize on the correct usage of the product, there will be a lot of guys labeling their mail as "carta social", just to save a couple of bucks, intentionally forgetting (or ignoring) the noble intention of the service offered. I am not even close of being an enthusiast of the Brazilian government, but I'll understand if they don't want everybody to know about the existence of the "carta social" at all.

After the invention of the Internet, I haven't received much personal mail. In the past, I used to receive some letters and christmas cards labeled as "carta social". From people like me, engineers, that I don't think would have their budget hurt by that extra dollar. I just used to get back to those guys and ask "Hey, do you know what "carta social" was created for?". Two answers I normally get are: "No." or "For paying just a penny for the postage.". This makes me really sad. Someone just told them that writing those two words on the front of the envelope allows them to pay just a penny for the postage. Couldn't they just tell them the whole story?!?

But what really pisses me off are those "spam" email chains that we always receive, with an intrincate conspiracy theory around the government, that they hide the low-cost postage from the people to make more money on the taxpayers and, because of that, everybody should use the "carta social" as a way to show them that the people's power cannot be denied, bla, bla, bla...

If the spam was to encourage everybody to discuss the R$ 0.55 rate for the regular mail postage, I'd be ok with them. I'd still just delete it, because I think the rate is reasonable (although slightly high), comparing to the $0.39 (about R$ 0.85 today) americans pay for first-class postage.

By the way, although I didn't pay anything to use this blog system, I could label it a "social blog post", due to its informative, non-profit nature... What do you think?