The Garbage Story

It's official: I HATE the Town of Markham's garbage-collection crew.

The backstory: Living across from a ravine, I have a serious raccoon problem, and like an idiot, I don't have a solid lock on my garage, so every night, no matter WHAT I have pressed up against the garage door (bricks, wood, MY CAR), the raccoons find a way in. I have no idea how, but as a result, there's always a stray garbage bag or two messed up. This has been going on for two years now.

Lately, though, I've been doing a LOT of cleaning of the house for various reasons, and we've stockpiled some SIXTEEN bags of garbage, plus whatever I've been able to stuff into actual garbage cans. Miraculously, the raccoons haven't been able to get in for the past two weeks or so (maybe they were full?), so I've been lucky in that respect.

Now, in my town, they have recycling and composting garbage picked up every week, and "other" garbage (eg my 16 bags full) picked up every other week. Last week, on Tuesday morning, I piled up all 16 bags outside to the curb before I left for work, confident that this was garbage week. Well, take a guess what happened? Wrong week.

My bad, I guess. So I stuff all 16 bags back in and again, the raccoons stayed away. So this Tuesday morning, I leave the bags out again. And so does everyone else on my street. I return at night, and EVERYTHING is still there (with the added bonus that the raccoons finally got to it and went to town on my collection, in particular). Why was there no garbage pickup? Well, I'm assuming that because Monday was a stat holiday (Easter Monday), the city decided to move the entire schedule back by one day. Fine, except.... THEY NEVER TOLD ANYONE! I checked our collection schedule, and it doesn't say anything on there. Also, the entire neighborhood had the same idea as I did, so it really wasn't my fault this time.

I got home and I was pissed. I wasn't about to cart all that garbage back in overnight, even if I did mean more raccoonage and garbage all over my lawn. At this point, I really don't care anymore.