The kitchen has run out of popsticks again. It's really quite annoying. I vastly prefer a disposable popstick for stirring my tea to locating and cleaning a spoon, using it, and then either cleaning it *again* or building up a karma debt by just leaving it lying around.
Which is quite funny. Somewhere out there, there's a pine (or something) plantation. There's a whole agricultural support industry behind it, too. The trees are harvested and sent off to a mill, where they're processed down to popsticks. Then they're shipped off to be sanitized and packed, and a huge distribution system comes into play, finally delivering large container loads of product to Optus.
Optus, of course, is a little microcosm of all of these processes (with the possible exception of all the disgustingly organic bits), and shifts itself into high(-er) gear on receipt of the goods, unpacking, inventorying, querying it's popstick ERP systems, repackaging, routing, consigning and so on.
At every step in the way, people *care* (I first received this epiphany in connection with waxed paper lolly wrappers). The plantation people lose sleep and feel nauseously ill at the destruction of their hopes and dreams if their plantation is hit with blight or pests or whatever.
The packing factory floor manager looks out over the machinery and sighs in satisfaction over how smooth everything is operating. He'll go home to his wife and tell her how he's managed to add three percentage points to the operating efficiency, and he's well on his way to being the top manager within the division, and might be looking at moving onto executive fast-track within five years.
(She, of course, will look at him with amused tolerance and never say "they're just *popsticks*, Henry" unless they're having a fight and she thinks that his ego needs to be whittled down a notch or two.)
And so on. Thus does a popstick arrive in the kitchen. At which stage, I swirl it through my tea for about three seconds and then throw it in the bin.
There is, of course, an argument to be made about people caring about scale rather than individual use. But the solipsistic perspective insists on the view that all of these people's lives, hopes and dreams are fundamentally dedicated to providing me with three second popsticks flings.
Turning this around is possibly one of the most depressing lines of thought one can follow (although if you squint a little bit and suppress all of those lesser, un-enlightened urges, it can also be strangely uplifting. Why is it so human to be fascinated with being a cog?).