Archives for September 2009

I wrote recently about the joys of elevators, particularly coupled with the nifty-if-battered-and-stolen shopping cart that I use to take groceries or other bags from my car to my condo unit.

But the joy doesn’t stop there. The elevator not only goes up, it goes down. Which means I can use it to take out the garbage.

I hate garbage. I particularly hate modern garbage. Old timey traditional garbage was nice and simple. You take anything you want to throw out, you put it in a bag, and three or four times a week you take the garbage to the curb and nice men take it away for you.

Modern garbage is different. Now, you have to separate out certain types of garbage from other types of garbage, with the delineation between garbage types often seemingly arbitrary. Some paper goes into the clear garbage bags, other paper into the black garbage bags. And if you get it wrong, the mean people from some sort of enforcement division give you a ticket.

Not only that, but in my old apartment on the UWS, garbage was even worse.
First of all, my apartment was a walkup, three flights to the street. So I’d come home at night, climb those stairs, and have to pick up garbage to walk down the stairs, only to have to walk back up if I wanted to sleep in my apartment. I hated climbing those stairs.

Second, they only picked up the clear garbage once a week, so you had to live with the clutter and stink of old cans and bottles for days and days until you could get rid of it. And if you forgot to drop them off Tuesday night, as I often did, you lived with them another week.

(Which reminds me of the time that I forgot, despite much nagging reminding from the wife, to bring the regular garbage down. And this wasn’t regular garbage, but three or four days worth of stinky garbage. So I oversleep a little the next morning, realize I forgot to put out the garbage, look out the window, and realize that the nice men have already come, and I’ve got two more days of stinky garbage and unhappy wife in front of me. Without telling her, I took the garbage down to the street, and nonchalantly (as nonchalantly as you can be carrying two bags of stinky garbage) carried it to the street, where I blatantly and illegally dumped them in the garbage can on the corner. I then slinked (slunk?) away, hoping no one saw me, and then cheerily went to work with the airy feeling of a man who has gotten away with something. That night, my wife sees me, and says, “was that OUR garbage in the can on the corner?” I still don’t know how she caught me).

And third, I hated the tying. I don’t know why this in particular bothered me, but I hated collecting all the newspapers — and I read a lot of newspapers — and tying them with twine. I hated doing that.

So one of the GREAT things about living in the suburbs is the joy of putting out the garbage. I still have the clear and the opaque, but here are the differences:

1. The elevator
Instead of walking up and down stairs, I take the garbage down in the elevator. I may not have mentioned this, but I hate stairs.

2. The shopping cart
My stolen shopping cart — stolen not by me, mind you — means I don’t even have to carry the garbage. I load it in the cart, and just roll it. Whoever invented wheels, I salute you.

3. The garbage room
I’ve never had a garbage room before. It’s a room, a very very very stinky room, in which we put the garbage. And we can put it there anytime we want, any day of the week. No more forgetting when the pickups are.

4. No twine
This is the best. No more twine. The nice guys who pick up the recycleables just want you to dump the newspapers into one of the bins — no bags, no twine. By itself, this change in my life has improved my daily mood by 8.5%.

So although I miss certain things about living in the city, my suburban garbage experience kicks ass.