There's One, Only!

I hate trash-day

Here at the GEBIV Family Boutique, we collect garbage. No, not in the organized, drive a truck down the street picking up trash-cans way. But rather in the manner that we have several trash-cans available for customer use. And they use them. Boy do they use them. The six outside 30 gallon trash-cans need to be emptied twice a week, on average.

And this is on top of the two to three bags of trash the bakery, store, and car-wash generate themselves each day.

So by Wednesday – garbage day each week, we’ve got quite a few bags of trash. All of them put together usually fill six 55-gal drums (with large, heavy boards on top – to keep the raccoons out). It's a large smelly mess of trashbags that has to be taken out to the street every Wednesday.

In the words of Ron White, “I told you that, so that I could tell you this story.”

Last week, we got new cell-phones at work. I’m not trying to disparage Sprint, but their cell coverage right where I live and work, and also at my parent’s house, is horrible. You could drop a call just by walking from one side of the property to the other. And on top of this, both my Dad and I had done some damage to our phones... Not enough to prevent them from working at all, but enough to prevent them from working properly.

We’d have gone with Verizon, they do have the best coverage in our area. Great coverage in fact. But they wanted to play hard-ball and wouldn’t give us any deals on signing up with them.

Which lead to AT&T-Cingular. Their coverage is almost as good as Verizon’s, much better than Sprint’s. But most importantly, they had a few deals going. Free phones with sign up. (Of course they weren’t the top-line phones, but we don’t need Razors or Blackberries. Or iPhones.) And even better, they had a $100 mail-in rebate for each phone.

The phones arrived last Thursday and we promptly passed them out, tested them and tried to figure out the features. (And called Sprint to cancel our old phones).

Life was good.

On Monday, after testing the phones over the weekend and determining that they were acceptable, we started to get everything together for the rebate forms.

Copy of the invoice. Check.

Copy of one month’s bill. Ok. Don’t have that. But it makes sense that they want to make sure you’re not just getting the rebate and canceling the phones.

Bar code off the box the phone came in. Che - Uh oh. One of the boxes is missing…

No problem. I must have just left it at home when I took the charger and instructions.

Not there. After two days of looking. Still not there. I must have left it lying around at work, where someone must have thrown it out.

Which leads us back to Wednesday, and the six 55 gallon cans of trash. And me digging through them off and on, for about three hours. In 90° plus heat.

…(we make a lot of apple pies at the little bakery tucked into the corner of our store. Fresh apple pies. Which means a lot of peels. Fortunately, the fermenting apples covered up most of the other smells. And there were a lot of other smells)…

Not there.

Oh well. I mentally resigned myself to losing the $100 rebate. I wasn’t happy. But I figured I had done all that was humanely possible in respect to finding the box. I scrubbed off and went back to work.

And after I closed the wash for the day, and stopped in to say goodnight to my grandparents, (who live on the first floor of my house.) Guess what we found sitting on the counter? Go ahead. Guess.

That’s right. THE BOX! I hadn’t taken it home. My grandmother did! And what was worse, she knew where it was all along, but didn’t understand what I had been out in the trash looking for.

Miscommunication. Gotta love it.

Posted by GEBIV at August 2, 2007 08:32 PM | TrackBack