When we first moved in, I thought the garbage men hated us.
It was particularly unsettling, because I in turn was extra happy about their presence. Having lived the previous decade in places where trash was escorted to dumpsters for disposal, I relished the thought of putting all our refuse neatly in a bin at the street for curbside pickup. How modern and luxurious!
I loved them. So their obvious hatred of our household really hurt my feelings.
How did I know they hated us? I inferred. I gathered evidence and heeded the signs. Basically, they left us one article of trash every week, and I could only interpret this as a very clear, "You suck."
I thought maybe their dislike was due to the amount of trash we produced in those first few weeks. Between wedding gifts and moving boxes, we were putting a lot of wrapping and packing stuff at the street. When I came to collect our garbage can in the morning, I'd find one little leftover. Every single time.
A piece of plastic in the bottom of the can. One little box. A discarded bag. Without fail, I was greeted with a piece of rejected waste every Friday morning, and it gnawed away at my homeowner self-confidence like nothing else.
What was I doing wrong? How had I incurred the wrath of the sanitary waste committee? I obsessed over the situation week after week.
Until the morning I was out walking while the trash was being collected. Intimidated by their presence anyway (did they recognize me? Did they know who I was??) I walked a little more quickly. They rumbled past me, and then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.
A mechanized arm reached out from the garbage truck, picked up the next trash can, and proceeded to dump the contents into the truck.
My trash service is robotic.
Aghast, amazed, stunned, I stood frozen in my tracks, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. When on earth did this marvel of technology develop? Go go gadget trash collection! I began to count the number of years since I had lived in a place where trash is collected, and I conceded that such a technological development could indeed have taken place.
But did others know about this? I glanced around to see if anyone else was watching this fantastic production. Nope. That lady continued to rake her leaves. That car at the stop sign had long since continued on its way. This was no modern marvel.
Not to anyone, in fact, not even children. I looked at trash trucks online when I got home (yes I did), and saw that this mechanical arm is the norm.
It's so commonplace that it's on children's toys.
Amazed, I stared out the window and snapped photos. You realize what this means? The trash guys don't hate me. They're not being catty when they leave me little leftovers from my own trash. They aren't doing it at all!
It's just a by-product of that mechanical arm; if something doesn't fall out of the can, it simply remains in the can!
I made up this huge situation and filled it with anger and guilt and drama, and it was all explained away with one robot trash-collecting arm. I laughed at myself and resolved to apply this to life more often.
Quit reading into things so much. If you pick up on some undercurrent of negative feelings among people, chances are you're making it up and it can all just be traced back to a robot trash-dumping arm.
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