I recall one year doing a
particularly good job of telling people what was going to be opened and closed
for a certain holiday. Included in that list was a definitive item about
garbage collection. Essentially, if a holiday were on a Monday, garbage collection
would be delayed by one day. Therefore, if your regular collection day fell on
a Tuesday, your holiday-week collection day would be Wednesday.
On Tuesday morning that week,
I pulled out of my driveway to head into the office and I noticed that my
neighbor had put out his garbage for that morning. Well, I thought, he doesn’t
read the paper. Then I noticed our neighbor on the other side had his garbage
can out. And the person across the street. And their neighbors. In fact, every
single house on my street had their garbage can out. I took a special trip
around the neighborhood and saw nearly every house with its garbage can out.
It is a small thing, I know,
but it got me to thinking about how the world would be a better place if
everyone just read the newspaper. After all, an evening stroll through the
neighborhood becomes unpleasantly stinky when the garbage is put out for
two days. Similarly, neighborhoods and street corners were littered with garage
sale signs, sandwich boards and posters for yard sales and youth sports signups
and pieces of paper stapled to telephone poles for lost cats and items for
sale. My perennial favorite was always the cardboard box with writing on the
side of it. I always had the nearly uncontrollable urge to swerve off the road
and drive over the box with my car, but there was usually a big rock placed in
the box to weigh it down.
I got to the thinking that if
everyone just read their local newspaper and advertised all their stuff in the
paper, we wouldn’t need all this clutter. But alas, people put up those signs
because otherwise, if they advertised only in the newspaper, they wouldn’t
reach a significant segment of the population.
But not just the small stuff
like garbage cans and yard sales would be affected. How about elections? That’s
pretty big. Like a supplemental levy election, which affected people’s taxes.
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