White trash, or don't eff with my cans, yo

Here we are on Day two, and no one has perished yet in the absence of Joey.  Except, perhaps, my 4-year old washing machine which has a very odd electrical burning smell and won't advance past the rinse cycle.  

I am envisioning mountains of laundry by the time the effers get out here to fix the thing.  Leave it to me to get some off-the-wall brand of washer instead of a damn Whirlpool or something.  With the amount it's been raining here in the past week, however, I could probably just lay our clothes out on the grass and let good ol' Mother Nature do her stuff.  Of course then there's the thought of the dog taking a crap on one of my BCBG blouses so maybe that's not such a great idea after all.

Did I tell y'all what happened with our trash collection last week?  Oh yeah, this is a good one.  So we have had a certain provider for the past, oh, EIGHT YEARS and about two months ago I got an email from them asking if I'd like to be put on their paperless billing program.  As an alleged tree hugger, I'm all about saving paper where I can (not to mention hello, I pay most of my bills online anyway) so I eagerly signed up for it.

Well...apparently our stellar IT filters caught my invoice up in there somewhere so I never got it nor did it appear on my "gotcha" emails that the server generates every few hours.  As in, I get an email that shows (or supposedly does) all of the spam that is headed for my account and then I can choose to release it to my email or just ignore it and it goes away.  

Last Wednesday, I got home from work to a voice mail from the trash company saying that they were coming to abscond with my trash cans due to "nonpayment of your account" - namely, I'm a trash deadbeat and they were hoofin' off with my cans, yo.  But they were unable to remove the cans due to "a dog that is in your yard" namely Rufus who was probably snarling and chasing their asses all the way back up the driveway.  Which actually, one of the cans smelled like something had died in there so the thought of them taking that particular can was pretty appealing.  But I gathered my senses...attempted to call their office which had closed a mere three minutes before...and then got online to their website and paid up my account.  

Thursday morning, I got on the phone first thing with my confirmation number for payment and called the trash company's office to tell them what had happened.  Obviously, the customer service representative either had her period or was just an overall flaming bitch, because she basically told me that A.) I could explain it a thousand times but look, yo, I've heard these stories all week from you deadbeat people, and B.) If I did want to continue with their stellar, unparalleled trash service then it would cost me $25 to reactivate my account.  

For reals?  $25 to keep the trash service going when I had accidentally not paid my bill?  Wow.  What a bargain.  Not to mention that not only was I a residential customer of this company, but I usually get my dumpsters through them too for work.  Talk about good customer relationships, huh?

So with a few choice words, I told her what she could do with her effing trash cans.  And that if they could get past Corgzilla in our driveway, they were welcome to come get them.  

And damn if I didn't get home that evening to find that we had no trash cans.   Oops.  Nothing like writing a check with your mouth that your ass can't cash.  And poor Rufus looked utterly defeated, so I can only imagine the hilarity that ensued when Frick and Frack showed up to take my (full) stinky trash cans.  Between them getting chased back up the driveway to them attempting to get my (full) stinky cans up in their truck, that was probably some Grade A neighborhood fodder right there.  

Luckily, said Trash Nazis don't corner the market here in the RVA, so I found someone else cheaper (yay!) that picks up on Wednesdays and we already have our beautiful new can that doesn't smell like ass.  

And this time, I'm not doing the paperless billing.