Thursday, June 12, 2008

Whoever You Are, I Wanna Thank You

The Wabi family vacation equation is that time spent away will be less than or equal to the amount of days spent packing and unpacking. [ :) ≦ %$*#!! ] So even though we only camped last Thursday through Sunday, this Thursday I am still sitting in a house crammed full of sleeping bags, flash lights, coolers, and deflated swim floats. Curiously, I am also still wiping the red clay dirt of the campground out of the children's nooks and crannies. I'm starting to wonder if that stuff is the base for tattoo ink.

And so it was not particularly surprising that being off my routine this week, I forgot to put the garbage cans out to the curb last night. It is a little more surprising and pathetic that I failed to notice all the cans of the neighbors out at the curb this morning when DH wrestled the kids into the car to take them to daycare. I only realized it was garbage day when the truck was roaring away directly outside my house. I ran downstairs through the garage in a halfhearted attempt to chase after the driver, knowing that once they get past your house, all you can really do is cram extra garbage into your over-full can for yet another week. Garbage trucks do not go back in Oakland. Since the hot summer weather has finally arrived here, I knew that it was going to be a smelly and possibly maggoty endeavor for the next week. Yech.

But the cans were not in their corral behind the row of cannas. At first I thought, "Wuh ... who would steal cans full of garbage?" Then the garbage man came around the side of the truck, carrying one large empty can in each of his huge hands.

"I got it," he said congenially.

"You got my cans out of the corral?" I stared at him like he was an alien.

"Sure," he said, shrugging.

So I'm having a Geggy Tah morning, folks. Whoever you are, I wanna thank you, garbage man. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

3 comments:

Sara said...

Dude. Our garbage collectors won't take the cans if they aren't perfectly positioned on the end of the driveway, never mind not even out of the corral - which means we've been left with garbage for a week because a car using our driveway to turn around pushed it a bit too far away. They have this arm thing on the truck that picks up and dumps them and they will not get out of the truck. What nice garbage man you have.

Wabi said...

I suspect that his niceness might have something to do with the fact that my kids often stand at the window waving and whooping at the guys in the truck like they are long-lost celebrities. So maybe the guys bent the collection rules on account of the A-team.

Julia said...

You know, the exact same thing happened to me a few weeks ago, and I was so insanely grateful.