What Happened To The Garbage-men?

You know what I long for?

I long for the days when you could just put garbage on your curb on the appointed day, and a truck would come by and scoop it all away. No matter how much or how little you had. A couple of big, burly guys would hop off the truck and chuck everything into the big compactor and take it away. No muss, no fuss. Crazy talk, I know…

Some of you are thinking, “wait, don’t they do that now?”. To which I respond, not in my city they don’t. It really chaps my hide too.

See, apparently our garbage removal company and/or city has passed a rule that they absolutely will not pick up anything that doesn’t fit in your oversized rental garbage can. You know, the ones that they use the fancy truck-based-picker-upper arm and everything. So long to the burly guys who earned our respect for working hard. Apparently these guys just sit in the truck sipping their coffee as the truck does all the actual work. I fully admit that I’m all in favor of technology and efficiency and the future and all that good stuff, but not when it actually provides a WORSE end service. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier.

Now, normally this isn’t a problem for us. Jess and I seem to generate a rather small amount of trash on a weekly basis. Jess is a big recycler, so a lot of our “trash” actually ends up in the recycle bin. Most of the time, in our big 90-gallon rolly-can we’ll have 1 or maybe 2 13-gallon garbage bags in there. Maybe a pizza box. That’s it. I’m sure it will change once the twins get here, but still. We’re just not big garbage producers.

However, recently we just had two cribs shipped to us which, of course were packed in an abundance of cardboard and styrofoam. Big old boxes… and I have 2 of them. Yesterday was garbage day, and just for shits and giggles I decided to put one out on the curb just in case they might actually take one. Of course, it was wishful thinking because when I got home from work, that friggin box was still sitting next to the can.

So, I have to spend 45 minutes with a box cutter chopping all this crap into bite size pieces in order to fit EVERYTHING in the can, since they won’t even dump the can if the lid isn’t 100% closed. It will probably take me at least 3 weeks to dispose of all this packaging since I can’t fit it into the can with our normal garbage. That really pisses me off. Because of the shape of the can, which tapers at the bottom, you really can’t fit anything even remotely “big” into it. Anger. Don’t even get me started on yard waste. If I mow the lawn and bag it I will fill about half our garbage can. Which means, unless I have only a bag or 2 of small stuff, I can’t really dispose of anything else that week. Thusly, I have crap just stacking up in the garage waiting until the week where I don’t have a lot of regular garbage so I can chuck it. I really don’t want to have to think about scheduling my garbage disposal. Seriously… this is where we’re at now? I don’t have enough to think about, I have to track my garbage?

Oh, they’ll happily rent me another can (and charge me for the privilege, of course). But, 90% of the time, that can would just sit there empty and take up a huge chunk of space. Not to mention that I’ll still have to spend my time chopping up every piece of cardboard larger than a foot wide anyway.

I guess I just wish we still had regular old trash service like when I was a kid. I can remember some weeks when there were 4 cans, 6 large bags, and an old rusted out something-or-another all there to be whisked away by our friendly neighborhood garbage man.

I miss those days.