For reasons no one can fathom, my apartment complex has invited Valet Trash into our lives. What this means: We all get a special trash container. You put your trash in the container. The container can then be left outside your door between the hours of 6pm and 8pm, Monday - Friday. During that time, an innocent woman is paid what I assume to be minimum wage to collect your trash, and walk it to one of the trash chutes that exist on every floor, like 20 feet from your front door. Then, your trash container has to be put back inside your apartment by 6am, or else you risk losing your Valet Trash service.
Nobody uses this service ever. It would be useful if it were dry cleaning, or dog walking, or DVR-setting (”I’m still at the office and I forgot that the Holly Madison reality show starts tonight! Can you send the Valet DVR lady up to record it? I promise I will have watched and deleted it by 6am tomorrow!”). And I have lived in apartments where this would be useful, apartments where the trash bins are down the street and around the corner and behind the liquor store and not especially anywhere you want to be at night. This is not one of those apartments. No one lives more than, like, 100 well-lit, indoor feet from the trash chute on his or her floor.
Many people have left their Valet Trash containers outside their doors in the vain hope that they might be discarded from our lives forever. This does not work. Instead, you get a letter on your door from management warning you that you are risking the loss of your Valet Trash service forever. Tragically, no one ever makes good on that promise. We are all just stuck with these extra trash cans that no one wants to use, because, despite being the type of people who live in a “luxury” apartment complex, we are not, in actuality, the type of people who believe some poor underpaid stranger should be responsible for carrying our bags of trash half the distance to the elevator each night. I don’t actually know that type of person. I think sultans might be like that.
I spotted this note on one of them in the hall today. It cracked me up.
