The Modernish Father

On our street, garbage day is Monday. Everyone rolls out their weird, squat green plastic trash cans to the curb and the big scary truck with the giant mechanical arm comes and does its magic. Then everyone rolls them back behind their house or into the garage when they get home from work. We’ve all got the system down.

Well, all of us except for my next door neighbors.

Case in point – today they rolled out both of their trash cans to the curb. As you’ll notice at the top of the page, today is not Monday. Today is Wednesday. No one’s coming to empty those cans for five more days. I’m guessing there’s at least a 75 percent chance they’ll leave them out there until then.

The whole “Monday is trash day” policy isn’t something new. It’s been that way at least since we moved into this neighborhood three years ago. Sure, they switched recycling days a few months ago, but nothing changed about normal trash day.

Furthermore, don’t you think the fact that NO ONE ELSE ON THE STREET put out their cans this morning would have clued them in that maybe today wasn’t the day?

Like I said, given their previous history of randomly putting out the garbage cans and other heavy trash items days before they’re supposed to, there’s a very good chance that they’ll just let it sit there for the next five days. They’re either too stupid or too proud (or perhaps both) to roll it back up the driveway.

Don’t believe me? It’s nine o’clock at night as I write this. They’ve already come home and washed one of their cars in their driveway. And the trash cans remain out on the curb.

Snail mail fail

Even if I were okay with my neighbors ignoring HOA regulations and city ordinances by leaving their trash out the in middle of our cul-de-sac for days on end (which I’m not), the real problem is what it does to the mail. See that mailbox in the photo? That’s not their mailbox. It’s mine. (I guess technically half of it belongs to The Wife as well.)

We have an extremely undedicated mailman. Well… that’s not fair to real mailmen. He’s just a contract worker who delivers the mail. I guess it’s cheaper for the post office to pay some random dude with a truck to deliver our mail than actually hire and pay benefits for a real, bonafide postal carrier.

Any way, this person with a pickup truck who allegedly works for the post office does a real half-ass job. Some days we don’t get our mail until 7 or 8 p.m.. Some days we don’t get it at all. And we almost never get mail on Mondays – because of the trash cans. I don’t even think he pretends to come down our street on trash day.

So guess what? Due to the stupidity/laziness of my neighbors and an extremely apathetic “mail dude”, there’s a good shot that I won’t get any mail until next Tuesday.

Grrrrrr…..

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• As someone who likes guys with awesome names, how did I miss this guy getting called up to the majors a few weeks ago?
• Looks like somebody made a mistake and then tried to fix it after they published. Glad to see I’m not the only one who does that.
• I’ve covered this topic before, but it’s still a valid question – why don’t weather forecasts get updated after they’ve been proven wrong?
• Wow, if that’s the kind of the discount I can get by downloading a digital copy of a book, I think it’s fairly safe to say that I’ll never buy a Kindle.
• If you’re going to use the fancy lingo that the kids use, it’s generally best to actually know what it means.
• In news that must make local chamber of commerces cringe, I discovered today that when you Google a ZIP code, the first result appears to always be a link listing the registered sex offenders in that area.
• Random drive-by mention of my twitter account on the interwebz – I was reading an article on social media know-it-all site Mashable.com and discovered that a reply to my twitter account was hidden in a screenshot of someone else’s twitter stream. Kind of like finding yourself in the background of a photo in a magazine, except even less cool. In fact, I’m not sure why I even pointed that out.