The Time of Year I Love to Hate

I know it's a good thing to be able to annually purge your property of all the accumulated junk that is gathering dust and taking up space. The local inorganic collections allow us all to do this, and I have certainly taken advantage of the opportunity this year.

Like the responsible citizen I am, I follow the rules and wait until the prescribed dates to load up the grass verge with my broken and worn out large inorganic items. I do this neatly, making sure that, as is requested, everything is left tidy and compact.

But no sooner is that done than the old adage 'one man's junk is another man's treasure' comes in to play. The vultures in their people movers scour the carefully stacked piles for what they consider to be useful. In my case I could barely unload the car before someone was baring down on my castoffs. And they don't care how slowly they travel, how spontaneously they stop, or where they stop - middle of the road, across the driveway...

Certainly they give no thought to retaining any 'order' the the junk piles. By today, the third or fourth day since most of us put our 'junk' out, shrapnel is spread across the road, broken glass is scattered through the piles and the whole suburb is, quite frankly, an eyesore. (I know I am generalising here, and lumping all the pile browsers into one unsavory category, but ... if the cap fits.)

As I said, I appreciate the opportunity to get rid of unwanted junk. But I wish it'd be picked up sooner, so that our neighbourhood could be spared the embarrassment of looking as it does today.