Where Have All The Pickers Gone?

When I was a kid, you could throw away just about anything. If you could haul it to the sidewalk then the town would take it away. Now, after a while society started to get smart and found out that things like electronics should not sit in landfills for 1,000 years and it was universally decided that you couldn't just throw those away, but we could still throw away pretty much every thing else and as much of it as you had. However, a couple years ago Norwood switched over to being one of those towns that issues barrels ("The Cult" as my father calls it) and put out the edict that you could only throw away as much trash as would fit into the barrels. There was no more hauling mattresses to the sidewalk and making the trash men deal with it. If it didn't fit in the barrel then it was going to remain on the sidewalk. So, the people in this town stopped putting their old furniture out for trash collection. And with that ended a very useful service of trash pickers.

It used to be that if you put anything of value out on the sidewalk on trash night people would come around and see if you were throwing away something they could either fix or paint to make it new to them. If they could then that item was gone by the dawn, and this was great. Some people look down on the folks who did this, but I looked at it like they were performing a service. Hell, people who do it get TV shows now. You didn't have to deal with that piece of furniture anymore, the trash men didn't have to lift it into their trucks and some one got a new couch - everybody involved won. Also, you got the ego boost of knowing that your trash was literally another man's treasure. Now, because of the way our trash collection works, those people never come around anymore.

Of course, I only noticed this because it directly effected me this week. For the last couple of years there was a very comfortable leather chair in our house that needed some repair. Well, we finally decided that we were never going to fix it and after the Salvation Army declared that they don't take any furniture that requires repair, we put it out on the sidewalk on a trash night. Come morning it was still sitting there on the sidewalk. I decided to give it another night and even went the extra step of putting a post on Craig's List under 'Free Stuff'. Still, nothing. The chair just sat on the sidewalk, looking rather pathetic. Finally, today my father couldn't take it anymore and brought the chair back up the driveway. We're going to have to find someplace else to throw this thing away. If the pickers were still around this never would have happened.