HAVE the school holidays turned you into a part-time/full-time taxi service?
Do you find yourself engaging in weird banter with small children about the deficiencies of government, the crime rate, or do you ask them politely their country of origin?
More to the point, do you absent-mindedly quote a fare for the 112km round trip you just completed to the beach swimming lessons, followed by a couple of drop-offs to their mates?
Considerately explain the $6 tariff has been applied as the temperature reached the old 100F? Do you occasionally look at the stars in your eyes at night and muse that there must be a better way?
Sadly, there probably isn’t.
But let’s fantasise for a moment that there is. Perhaps Collaborative Consumption holds the key.
It’s an expression new to me, as quoted in the Australian Conservation Foundation’s habitat magazine.
It refers to “the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping that is being made possible through network technologies and a growing global awareness that the planet can no longer sustain the way we live”, as outlined in What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.
Examples include parking at other people’s homes, clothing exchanges, borrowing money, sharing accommodation and disposing of unneeded goods.
Now, I’m not for a minute considering ‘sharing’ my children in any shape or form. But couldn’t I share the cost of this glorified taxi service somehow?
Now, this is a collaborative exercise. I’m not pretending to have a solution.
Can you imagine the utter fear of establishing a way of ferrying children from place to place?
The duty of care, the paedophiles, the crazy drivers, the disciplinarians whacking your children when they play up... it’s the stuff of legalistic nightmares.
But, but... what are parents getting from these countless hours of car time?
Sure, it’s nice just to be with your kids for a while, in a situation where they can’t escape and may consider meaningful conversation with mum or dad a reasonable solution to the boredom.
But imagine simply going from place to place, picking up children along the route, using an internet service.
Children safely and professionally dropped at their destination, with the parents watching on mobile phones.
Pie in the sky, I know. Subject to more holes than the plot of an average episode of Charlies Angels.
But, hey, if you happen to collaborate with someone and come up with a solution, I’d love to hear about it in time for the next summer holidays.