Did we stop to think of the day after?

I was waiting at a traffic light to cross the road yesterday, when a road-cleaning car passed by. You know, one of those cars with two rotating suction fans in the front, inching painstakingly along the road. It rattled and boomed and groaned past me, ploughing through the trash on the road, leaving behind it a wake of surprising cleanliness.

I was just marveling at it's apparent efficiency when suddenly it came to a clanging halt by the sidewalk. The driver craned his neck out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of what had gone wrong. A streamer had gotten caught in one of the front suction fans. So he parked the unmanoeverable car to the side, jumped out, rounded the car to inspect the fan. There was nothing to it but brute force, so he braced his feet against the tire, took hold of the streamer, and leaned back, using bodily weight to coax the streamer out. The streamer suddenly snapped, and he fell back, plomping his bottom sharply on the sidewalk. He stood up quickly, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed, dusting his posterior and hurrying back to the car.

Looked like things were functioning again, because the car immediately re-started down the road. It proceeded another twenty yards or so, and then came to a stop again by the sidewalk. The cleaner peered out the window. Another streamer in the suction fan. Sigh. Again, he clambered out to assiduously cater to the fan, like he had probably done at least twenty times that morning before I saw him. The whole process was so painstaking, and he did it so conscientiously, it tore my heart.

I can't believe we've invented satellites that can study pluto, and we haven't as yet got around to inventing road cleaning cars that can cope with the aftermath of July 4th celebrations.