Tales from the Shark Tank

I’ve been trying to get rid of as much as possible of the horrifying clutter that has taken over the house and garage for a while now. “Clutter” sounds like small stuff, and much of it is. Some of it, however, isn’t. Among the objects that isn’t is an upright freezer inherited from my grandfather. It worked when it stood in his garage, and my mother couldn’t bear to just throw away a working freezer (even if it didn’t work very well), so I let her send it here. The freezer we have seemed to be on its last legs, so it was a reasonable thing to do. It was duly delivered and set in the garage, and there it has sat for about the past two years, as our old freezer emulated the Everready Rabbit and just kept going.

Finally I decided to freecycle the damn thing if it was working. Trouble was, the clutter had so firmly surrounded it that I couldn’t get at the back to plug it in and make that determination. That finally happened yesterday, and lo, it didn’t realize it had been plugged in at all. I turned dials and pushed switches, to no avail. The thing is electrically dead as a doornail. We have an appliance dolley, so one of my kids helped me get it down to the curb for heavy trash pickup. I taped the door shut at a level out of reach of children and probably of short adults as well, and abandoned it to its fate.

The trash went out. The freezer did not. Hmm. I got on the city website to see if I had misremembered the heavy trash pickup policy. The answer turned out to be that I both had and had not. I had remembered when heavy trash day was, but had missed the caveat. You have to call ahead to dispose of things containing freon, and yes indeed, the freezer contains freon. So I called and gave my address, and got a promise from a nice clerk to send someone out to pick it up. I asked when I should call back if it was still sitting there. She told me to give them a week. I have a hunch the neighborhood association will be screaming considerably before that, and the thing is blocking one side of my driveway, which may make things awkward for Wednesday’s project of moving our housemate out. But whatever comes, until the city comes to get it, there it stands. If the neighborhood association wants it moved, they can send someone to help move it. I can’t budge it by myself, and it won’t fit in my minivan.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Life as I know it. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.