Another volley fired in the garbage wars

My ongoing love-hate relationship with the local "waste management" company has been the topic of so many posts that I don't want to tackle the job of creating links to them. If you're all that curious, you can go to the blue bar at the top of this post, type the word "garbage" in the white box at the left, then click on "search blog." Otherwise, I'll just note here that the battle continues.

For more than ten years now, my neighbors and I have clustered our cans side by side at the curb. We've done this out of consideration for the trash collectors, thinking this arrangement would save them some steps. Apparently, the company has recently managed to eliminate a few jobs by mechanizing the physical process of picking up and dumping the cans into their truck. That's fine. Whatever. But if they wanted us customers to begin doing things differently, it would have been nice if they'd mentioned it up front.

Instead, they surprised us. I came home for lunch on trash-pick-up day and found this (click the photo to enlarge it):


I cropped off the company name and contact numbers just to be nice. And to not get sued.

As you can see, my neighbors and I unknowingly violated the "improperly placed cart" rule. And, in case the explanation on the card wasn't detailed enough, somebody kindly wrote a few words to explain it in more clearly: "Cart need to be divide apart." Well, all righty then. I get it now, and I will divide cart apart in future.

If you look closely at the photo, you'll see what appears to be a white circle at the upper left. The circle is actually a hole in the card. There's a slit from the edge of the card to the hole, so I assume the card was designed to hang from the garbage can handle. Instead, this one was lying in the driveway and another one just like it was in the middle of the front yard. After I traipsed through the wet grass to get the second card, I had to deliver it in person to the neighbors.

There's no telling what kind of problems we might have had if the card had blown away and the neighbors didn't know cart need to be divide apart. They might not understand why I put my garbage can off by itself on the other side of the driveway from theirs. They might think I believe my garbage isn't as stinky as theirs. Or they might decide I must have had a good reason for moving my can, which could lead them to put theirs right next to mine again, on the side of the driveway where we've never put them before.

We'd have the same problem all over again. Then the garbage picker-uppers would think we're really stupid.