This morning, I was informed that fans are no longer acceptable curbside trash. To say the least, this was utterly shocking and turned my worldview upside down. Granted, it was early and I hadn’t taken down any coffee yet, but still.

I usually don’t meet up with the garbage man at the curb. Not because I have anything against garbage men, but because the chances of me being at the end of my driveway for the roughly 90 seconds they’re also there per week are relatively slim. And I’d also like to say that I have nothing against garbage women either. Fine people all the way around and no gender assumptions are being made in terms of the overall composition of the trash collecting workforce. The person who picks up my trash is a man. Yours might not be and that’s fine too. I think what we’re all most concerned with is whether they pick up the trash and where they leave the buckets afterwards, aren’t you?

Which is the issue I experienced this morning while dragging out the recycling to the curb and met up the garbage man as he was pulling a fan out of the bucket.

A word about this fan… We’ve had this pedestal oscillating fan longer than either of our vehicles and it’s served us well. Probably too well. We’ve now reached the point in this particular fan’s life when it doesn’t always start up right away. Instead, it’ll hum for a few minutes and eventually kick over. I could deal with that if it did what it does half the time, which is go about it’s business soundlessly. However, there’s the other half where it makes this awful screeching noise that, if it happens when one person is sound asleep, will cause them to jump out of bed into a karate-esque crouch ad bump their heartbeat somewhere into the hummingbird range. It’s not pleasant or conducive to getting back to sleep any time soon.

So it was this fan’s time to go, I wanted it to go, and yet here was this good gentleman seemingly refusing to let it go.

“No fans,” he said.

“No fans?” was my quippy reply.

“Nope. Gotta take it to the transfer station.”

Which means putting the thing in the car, driving across town, and delivering it to the transfer station and more than likely paying them for the privilege of taking my busted fan. I’m sure it has something to do with the motor or some other component that shouldn’t be tossed directly into a hole somewhere and I’m okay with that. Although it does seem a little redundant considering that I’m sure his truck will be going past the same place.

I would’ve liked to ask more questions and perhaps tried to persuade him to take my fan, but somehow, I don’t think he would’ve been much of a fan of that.