Trash Day Rant Redux

Given past experience with the vulnerability of our trash receptacles on garbage day, we should have known better. We shouldn't have run out of garbage bags. The children shouldn't have filled an unlined can. My wife shouldn't have put that can out on the street to be emptied into the truck.

But it seems to me that it ought to have been perceivable that the whole thing wasn't meant to be taken, and I'm close enough to that line of work to imagine that we were on the receiving end of a lesson about pushing the boundaries of those who serve us. Personally, were I a garbage man in a sour mood, my instructional method would have been to leave the can untouched. Moreover, were they garbage men who stood to lose my business, they might have been more circumspect about the conclusions to which I might come, and were their employer not assured of my payment no matter my personal impression of his company, I'd be more confident that a complaint would be justly addressed.