Hyderablog

Bring Your Own Scale

Newspaper recycling where we are in Hyderabad is a pretty straightforward affair. You save your old papers and magazines, and then every month or so someone comes to the door to collect them. The nice thing about this is that this person actually pays you for the privilege of taking the papers away, after weighing them to determine their value. He takes them and sells them to someone else, after which they're presumably either turned into pulp or used for other purposes.

A few months back, the paper guy came to our door for the monthly collection. He pulled out his trusty weighing scale - this is an old-fashioned scale with metal trays on either side and a small rope in the center from which the trays are suspended. The items to be weighed are placed in one tray, and weights of varying measures go in the other until the two sides are equally balanced and the total weight added up. Kind of like if you were being weighed to determine your weight in gold, except the scale here is much less grand and the result, unfortunately, is not nearly as lucrative. Typically, we'll pocket anywhere from 50 to 150 rupees ($1-$3) per visit for this, depending on how many empty beer bottles we give him (these too he takes for recyling).

Anyway, just as our papers have been piled onto the scale and the paper guy announces the final reading, our neighbor from down the hall ambles over (the weighing happens in the corridor just outside our apt.), and says something to Usha to the effect of "You know he's cheating you, right? I don't know how exactly, but I guarantee he's cheating you." This neighbor of ours, always warm and friendly, also has an acute awareness for this sort of thing, so Usha asked what he meant. So he promptly took the scale from the paper guy, and within a minute discovered that his hunch was right. He found that the small rope from which the apparatus hung had a hidden metal bar inside of it, which the person doing the weighing could use to his advantage to alter the reading so that the papers appeared to weigh less than their actual weight. Half-outraged, but more amused, Usha went inside to retrieve our reliable bathroom scale, and piled the same papers onto it. Sure enough, the reading on the bathroom scale was a few kilos more than than on the paper guy's.

When confronted about this, the paper guy just sort of shrugged sheepishly. Now, realize that the difference we would have "earned" had we not been cheated by the trick scale could just about buy you a pack of gum here, so we were hardly concerned about the cash, if you could call it that. Of course, it was the principle of the thing! From then on, the paper guy understood that when he came to our door, it was strictly a bring-your-own scale affair (ours, that is). The last time he came and I snapped this picture of him, he was initially concerned that we might be planning to report him and his metal bar to the local police. Then, when I explained (via translator) that I just wanted a picture of him and his scale because we were amused by the whole thing, he quickly warmed up and insisted we give him a copy of the picture (which we did). He insisted that the shot be taken with him holding the "authentic" scale, not wishing to be seen plying his trade with our bathroom scale.

posted by David @ 3:15 AM