Day of Cancel: Rescheduling Edition

Yesterday, Waste Management, which picks up our trash / recycling on a weekly basis, rescheduled to today. Today, Waste Management rescheduled to next Thursday. Yes, you read that correctly. The paragraph informing me was gemlike in its forthright failure to acknowledge the fact they were canceling.

“Your waste service for 6/17/2021 has been rescheduled. We will return for service on 6/24/2021. Please make sure your container is accessible. We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience and commitment to safety. Thank you for trusting Waste Management as your environmental solutions partner. We truly appreciate your business.”

I went to the website to see if I had somehow misunderstood. No, no I had not. Here are the two notifications in website form (the above was in email):

All customers residential waste service for 6/17/2021 has been rescheduled in ACTON, STOW. We will return for service on 6/18/2021. Please make sure your container is accessible for service.

All customers residential waste service for 6/17/2021 has been rescheduled in ACTON, BOXBOROUGH. We will return for service on 6/24/2021. Please make sure your container is accessible for service.

I would like to make a few observations. First, in the email form, they frame a cancelation as a reschedule, and then immediately hit you with a request. I guess they want to make sure I don’t feel like I am in a position to complain? And then, in case I somehow still felt like there might be a basis for saying, Wait A Minute, You Just Canceled My Weekly Service, What Do You Mean Reschedule, they followed up with: “your patience and commitment to safety.” Mmm hmmm.

I encourage everyone to adopt this strategy. Don’t feel like working on Friday? Call and reschedule to Monday. Extra hard getting the kid to wake up and get ready for school? Call and reschedule to the next school day. Maybe the next school week. Maybe the next school year. Heck, maybe the 17th of Never.

The next step in this path is something along the lines of, ‘“We’ll pencil you in for next week,” followed by, “We’ll get back to you,” “When we feel like it,” and eventually, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

A Few Remarks About Diversity And Success

Moderna and BioNTech both put out highly successful mRNA vaccines, which work in extremely similar ways. I don’t understand the details, however, an important component of getting the information in the vaccine to stick around long enough to be made use of by the immune system involves modification to the RNA by swapping out uracil with pseudouracil. And I apologize for all spelling and explanation errors in advance. Recently, Curevac put out some preliminary results on their particularly _un_successful mRNA vaccine, and let’s just say they opted _not_ to make that particular change, and got a very different result.

There are now many articles which attempt to puzzle out what went wrong.

There’s an easy explanation: gosh, they tried to mod the RNA in a different way and it didn’t work as well. But that just creates a new question. If the two other companies both opted to do that, why didn’t Curevac?

You could say, well, a bunch of We Didn’t Invent It Here Germans, because, Curevac is German. And honestly, making fun of Germans is a Pretty Fun Activity! Volkswagen really gave that a new lease on life with their defeat device, but there are plenty of older reasons to make fun of Germans. The part of my ancestry that is not Dutch is mostly German, so I even have some amount of right to do this (German ancestry) AND it’s part of my heritage to make fun of Germans!

But, you know, BioNTech is also a German company.

What’s the difference between BioNTech and Curevac?

What’s the difference between a husband-and-wife team of Turkish-ancestry Germans and a bunch of Germans and a Frenchman — all, I might add, men. I suppose you could follow it up with, What’s the difference between Mainz and Tubingen.

A bunch of white men of Northern European ancestry in charge of making decisions is generally speaking going to have a lot to lose, and be quite reluctant to make the big leap. That’s how you get Intel style failures. And that’s how you get an mRNA vaccine, late to the game, with 47% efficacy.

ETA: If you are wondering about my failure to comment on Moderna, chalk that up to, What Else Is There to Say Anyway? I mean, obviously, I’m glad they got a successful vaccine out, but it’s hard to think of that as directly attributable to anyone who was a founder, or anywhere near the executive level of that company.