Trash Talk

Could I be the only one who sometimes gets a little nervous when the garbage man comes? I'm not afraid of the garbage man, per se, even though he could potentially throw me into the back of the scary truck that smooshes stuff, I suppose.

No, I sometimes worry about whether he's going to accept whatever weird thing I have left at the curb on any given week.

This week, I have a giant section of PVC pipe that I ripped out of the ground. It was one of my many failed attempts at being manly years ago. I had dug up the yard and stuck this pipe in the ground as some sort of demented drainage project, but naturally that didn't work as planned. So I finally ripped it out of the ground and nervously placed it at the curb yesterday.

I really have no idea if there's a limit to what they'll haul away. I know that neighborhoods near us have a different waste disposal company, and they're limited to two bags of garbage a week. Two bags wouldn't be nearly enough for us; I can use that much in belly button lint alone.

I know that some of our neighbors are edgy about a possible limit, too, because sometimes they'll spread their garbage to the fronts of other neighborhood houses in an effort to trick the garbage people into taking a huge mound of stuff. Yesterday, for example, a neighbor stuck an old ladder in with our stuff.

Over the years, I can only remember one instance when the garbage guys refused to take something I had left at the curb, and that was a waterbed mattress. It must have weighed 500 pounds, so it seemed. I left it at the curb, and I remember spying on the garbage man from behind a curtain to see what would happen when he came.

A couple men started to lift the mattress, and once they realized how heavy it was they said the heck with it and left it behind. So the next week I chopped it up and distributed it into about 10 garbage bags and left all of them at the curb, and sure enough, the garbage men took them all away.

I used the same strategy with a barbecue grill last year. It took me the better part of a day to dismantle that sucker into enough innocent-looking bags that it no longer looked like a grill.

We have a spare refrigerator that is probably on its last legs. I'm already eyeing it up to see how I can fit that baby into a series of bags...