Dirty Work

The company I work for is not what you would call... diverse. At 32, I am actually the second-youngest person in the office and the only person who has never been married. My coworkers are, by vast majority, a group of middle-aged, Midwestern white men. Due to these demographics, the only retirement party I've ever attended in my adult professional life was the one my boss hosted for the suddenly defunct laser printer she'd been using since the mid-80s. Yes, that's right; you heard me correctly. We had a retirement party for a printer. I'd like to say we do this sort of delightfully quirky thing in my office all the time (it sure would make going there every day a bit more interesting if we did), but really this was a one-time event I'd not seen the likes of before or since. And truthfully, it did all seem a bit silly to me, but there was cake involved, and you'll rarely find me complaining if there's cake.

Along with the cake, my boss planned a little trivia contest for the event. We each had to tell her what we were doing in the year the printer was purchased, and we then had to guess, by looking at the list of anonymous answers, which response was from whom. I won this contest, not because I know my coworkers like siblings but because I am, apparently, fairly good at putting two and two together and drawing accurate conclusions from assorted tiny clues. I've never really fancied myself much of a Nancy Drew, but I do have my moments, it seems. I won a similar trivia contest at a company holiday party a year previous, so apparently I was on some sort of a roll.

Anyway, the prize for this trivia contest was a bit of a mixed blessing. Realizing that the company would have to pay to dispose of the enormous and archaic printer, my boss placed a Target gift card inside and said that the winner could have the gift card, but would have to take the printer as well. It reminded me a bit of an episode of That 70s Show where Donna, in a dream, was a Let's Make a Deal contestant, and picked the door for her high school boyfriend, but had to accept that he was riding a donkey and promising a life of no excitement or adventure as well. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing the dirge of the ancient printer, but the fact is, it was a shitty way to ruin the excitement of free Target merchandise.

I don't honestly know if my boss would have stuck to the "you have to take the printer, too" rule or not. I'd have a hard time believing that some small electronics disposal fee would really, in her eyes, have been worth the inevitable blow to employee morale. But I live in Minneapolis, a city that, despite its green focus, takes damn near anything from its residents on trash day, so I actually took the printer without any major protest or complaint. I placed it in my driveway beside my garbage bin, and when I came home from work the next day, it was gone. It was like magic, really. The same thing happened when I chose to dispose of the metal awnings that used to grace the exterior window frames on my house. One morning, they were there; the following evening, they were not.

I consider myself fairly environmentally minded, so officially, I think the City should maybe make it a bit harder for its residents to get rid of their potentially recyclable and reusable junk. Unofficially, however, I must admit I've found their rather generous and liberal pickup policy quite handy more than once. In general, then, I've been fairly willing to pay the slightly-higher-than-usual monthly fee for sanitation services, given the leeway they allow.

That, is, however, until this week.

As some of you know, I'm in the midst of a project I could refer to as "Operation: White Trash Yard No More." My goal is to replace the random plants and weeds and lazy, barren ugliness surrounding my house with a more intentional-looking landscape design of aesthetically pleasing flora and foliage. Like nearly all projects I take on around my house, however, the whole ordeal is taking seventeen times longer than I anticipated and, despite Poppy's ever-so-helpful and welcome advice, I may end up postponing (or perhaps entirely abandoning) large portions of the plan. In any case, I have, after many hours of slaving, finally removed all the weeds and grass and evergreen droppings from the bed alongside my house and am finally prepared to start the prettifying process in that one area at least. The City sanitation workers, however, have apparently seen fit to rain on this would-be progress-parade by holding a very localized garbage service strike. That's right--they're ignoring my yard waste.

I'm not entirely surprised; I knew expecting them to take eight bags of dirt and mulch and miscellaneous weeds was a bit optimistic, I suppose. But I've also visited the City's Web site; I know that they mass-burn my garbage to convert it into electricity for Xcel, and I know that they take my yard waste and compost it in some way or form. So why they'd remove free of charge an obviously not biodegradable nor burnable hunk of plastic and electronics that is larger than my television set but refuse eight bags of entirely organic and harmless matter is entirely baffling to me.

What the City wants me to do with my unacceptable yard waste, apparently, is take it to a properly authorized disposal site, where presumably they'll weigh the bags and assess some type of fee. That would be the right way to dispose of the crap currently piled up in my garage. I'm generally a rule-follower, but in this particular instance, I think the rule is just plain foolish. I come from rural Wisconsin, after all, where dirt is dirt, and you pay money neither to acquire nor dispose of it. Responsible citizen or not, I can't pay to get rid of dirt. No, instead I say a bit of civil disobedience is in order.

So my mission now is to get rid of eight bags of dirt and mulch and dead evergreen needles in an entirely covert fashion. My options, as I see them, are thus:

1. Add the dirt, two or three cups at a time, to my regular home garbage, where it will be neatly concealed and tied up and tossed into my trash bin. Continue this maneuver for the next seven months, until all eight bags are finally empty.
   


2. Load the bags into my car and drive to some unpopulated, rural area, where I can return my domestic dirt to nature by dumping it into a ditch, gravel pit, or new construction site. Cross my fingers that no one sees me executing this plan, thinks I am disposing of body parts or drug paraphernalia, and reports my license plate to the police.
   


3. Rig up some sort of reverse-vacuum system to gradually suck the dirt out of the bags and into a long, pliable tube. Drive around at night with the tube extended out my window so as to scatter the dirt gradually over the course of several miles.

Any thoughts on which one of these plans is least likely to get me arrested would be much appreciated. If the answer is #3, any suggestions on how to MacGyver together the necessary items to create said reverse-vacuum system would also be quite helpful.