I was out having coffee, the other day, when I tried to throw away my trash.
I was immediately confronted by the last thing I expected: an intelligence test!
I flunked, of course.
I do, however, plead extenuating circumstances. That thing was no ordinary trash can.
Instead of an open top, suitable for the jettisoning of waste materials, it had a closed, flat top, in which there were a few different openings.
One was a circle that said “Recycle,” with the further explanation: “Aluminum and Cups; Plastic and Paper; No Glass.”
The second opening was another circle. It was labeled “Landfill,” and added two simple words: “Everything else.”
Here’s my first problem. Clearly, it wasn’t for “everything else,” because even if I had understood what to do with all my other items — which I did not (what category is a wooden stirrer?) — I also had a tray. A cardboard tray. Which I always thought was something that could be recycled, but the trash can disagreed with me, and anyway — this is my biggest complaint — it didn’t fit into either hole.
So for starters, that cheerful, optimistic “everything else” was a lie!
And there I was, staring at those two round holes, holding my rectangular tray, and I froze in my tracks.
It occurred to me to just stuff the tray down one of the holes, but even the shortest dimension of the tray (which would be the width, or the height, depending on whether you’re holding it flat in front of you or balancing it on its edge on the trash can surface) was bigger than the diameter of either circle.
Suddenly, I was faced with, not just a square tray and a round hole, but a whole entire geometry problem. Or, to put it into mathematical terms, 2 pie are square, and so is my tray (or rather, rectangular, which is a subset of quadrilateral, as are squares) and the 2 pie are not going into this can, nohow. Not even 1 pie are.
In the second place — why should I have to know where the coffee shop’s trash is going, just to throw mine away? Why burden me with this? Isn’t that stuff all governed by corporate carting contracts, anyway, not to mention municipal agreements?
Plus, isn’t it subject to change? I remember when the folks taking my home recycling changed their instructions. At first they only wanted a few of the “PETE” numbers of plastic — those little numbers inside the triangle that you can never find— and then they changed their tune. But it was too late. I’ll be darned if I put my trash through the dishwasher just to find out it’s the wrong little number. Plastic is plastic is plastic, and if that’s not good enough for my garbage contractor, that should be their problem, not mine.
I tell you, that trash can reminded me of those toys I used to give my toddlers, supposedly to make them smarter — you know, the shape-sorters, with the triangle, circle, and star-shaped openings to push appropriately-shaped pieces through.
Except I’m not getting any smarter.
And while I am frozen in place, in the middle of the coffee shop, trying to be a good citizen, I have instead become a traffic obstacle, with people piling up behind me saying things like ‘Excuse me, Ma’am?” and “Can I help you?”
And I want to say, “Yes, help me, please! Where do I throw this trash?”
But that’s too humiliating — “You mean you’ve raised two children almost to maturity, and you don’t know how to throw out your own trash?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. Why don’t I stand aside and watch while you take a turn?”
This is not even the worst case I had to deal with. Somewhere else, recently, I was faced with a can which DID want glass, and even had a place for cardboard…except that, that time, my tray was made of styrofoam! (The plate, too — dispensed right under the sign asking us to keep our use of styrofoam to a minimum.)
And of course, none of the designated openings were for styrofoam.
Luckily for me, there was an open-mouthed can nearby. Guess where everything went?
This is just another proof that the people who design these things, and inflict them on us, all live somewhere else instead.
I wonder where that is.
I’d like to join them for lunch.
