Well, the government didn't shut down here on Saturday. This is hardly the topic for a column, right? Not so fast. A little context: the snow began Friday, January 1 in the afternoon and didn't stop until Sunday morning, January 3, at which point we couldn't tell it had stopped due to the 40 mph winds. For those of you reading this in Eastern Iowa this is rehash, but for the rest of you, my fair city was the recipient of 15.5 inches of snow in less than 36 hours.

Now read that first sentence again. Saturday was trash day in our part of the city, and I was one of the freakshows who put trash on the curb during the blizzard. I remarked to my wife Saturday morning that it wouldn't be much fun dragging all that waste back up to the garage just because the trucks hadn't made it. But I was wrong. Not only did the sanitation and recycling trucks run their regular routes, but they did so within 1/2 hour of their usual stop time.

Of course, in order to do that, they needed clear streets, which were provided as crews hit the road early Saturday during the storm to try and keep the roads clear. And clear they were. By Sunday, at the end of the storm, cars were zipping past my house (which was confusing because the churches were closed - where the heck were these people off to when it was 25 below?) The road crews apparently made another pass Sunday morning to clear off the new snow.

As they say on the infomercials: "But wait, there's more!" Saturday was a regular mail day. True to the post office motto, there appeared my regular mail carrier at his regular time, struggling to lift himself with each step out of the boot-high snow, unable to see exactly where he was. Arriving safely were my two credit card solicitations for this week and an alumni magazine of some kind.

And so, days like Saturday make me steam at people who make arguments about the inefficiency, ineffectiveness, wastefulness, over-regulation and other nonsense they see as being rampant in government. Of course there is validity to the occasional $900 hammer story. However, the truth is that the vast amount of government dollars spent and the greatest number of hours worked go into the kind of social infrastructure services which, as described above, range from the mundane to the excruciating. Ask yourself if you would have wanted to work for the government in my city on Saturday. Also ask what private company in its right mind would have operated at the kind of inefficiencies that must have existed on Saturday. Talk about waste--plowing the streets twice in one weekend? Sometimes it seems essential government services aren't like those provided by a business at all. Seemed that way on Saturday.

So, some big kudos to the folks who kept the trains running on time. Shame on anybody who scapegoats government workers or programs to serve their own ideological ends.

John Hedgecoth has had parts of his education, his house and even a few six-packs financed by various goverment grants. You know he's not gonna call for it to all come tumbling down.