Yesterday, one of our landladies gave me a ride to the medical building place to get my mammogram. On the way, she told me that this crappy-assed town is going to start charging us for trash pickup.
The way they are going to do it is stupid. They will be selling these special yellow trash bags, no doubt at some inflated price, and we have to use those. No yellow bags, no trash pickup. To make it slightly more annoying, we have to buy the bags at the local Stop & Schlop. I hate Stop & Schlop, we hardly ever go in there anymore. Okay, it’s not as skeevy as it used to be since they fixed the place up, but we still prefer Shaw’s and Market Basket.
Anyhoo, here’s the skeeve factor in all of this. For years, I have been ranting about various neighbors around here who can’t be arsed to buy garbage bags, they just throw loose trash into the outside cans, and sometimes they tip over and then you have trash all over the place. I’ll never forget the one family who used to live in the skeevy building behind us, they used to throw used diapers in the outside trash cans, and yep, we’d come home and find the used shitrags scattered all over our driveway.
My point is…if these people can’t even be arsed to buy even so much as a cheap box of generic trash bags from the local Family Dollar store, how in the blue hell is anyone gonna get them to buy the overpriced yellow bags from Stop & Schlop? I can see it now…they will just keep putting out their trash as usual, the trucks won’t pick it up, and we’ll have all sorts of skeevy, stinky trash piled up all over the place. We already get raccoons and skunks around here at night, we’re always careful to tighten the lids on our trash cans to keep them out of our trash. But they’re gonna have a field day, what with all of the loose garbage that’s gonna pile up week after week. Next thing you know, we’re gonna start seeing RATS. I haven’t seen a rat around here in all of the years I’ve been living here, but if this scenario plays out as I think it will, we will.
I don’t know when all of this is to take effect. I took the trash out today, since Tuesday is garbage day, and I didn’t see any yellow bags in anyone else’s trash yet.
The other thing that pisses me off is the fact that we have to pay for this service in the first place. Our rent goes up every single year, because the property taxes that the landladies have to pay keep going up each year. We all pay taxes to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, some of which money is supposed to go to individual cities and towns. We have to pay a rather hefty excise tax for our cars, which goes directly to the town.
Yet, it seems we get NOTHING in return for all of this money. If I call the cops because the local FFAâ„¢ is out loitering on my porch at 1AM, they can never be arsed to show up. During the winter, half the time, they won’t plow our side street, and then it’s impossible to get our cars out. That’s also where we have to leave out trash to be picked up, and if the street’s not plowed, the garbage truck won’t come in and collect the trash.
So, what the fuck exactly ARE we paying taxes for? This whole thing just pisses me off to no end!
Oh that SUCKS! We had to buy those stupid bags when we lived in Worcester. What a pain in the ass. Trash pickup for us was on Monday morning and it seems that every Sunday night I would have to trek up to the local Shaw’s to buy those dumb bags because we were out. And half the time they didn’t have the large size that we needed (there were two sizes a small bag and a large one) – small ones don’t cut it for cleaning out the cat boxes! On top of the crazy expense for the bags, they were worse than anything you could buy at the Dollar Store, very flimsy and you couldn’t fill them very full or they would just about break. And you know they make them that way so you have to buy even more of them!
I agree, what the hell do you pay taxes for in MA? We were paying $2500 a month for our house, plus the crazy insurance costs, more expensive groceries, gas, etc. I loved living in MA, but the cost of living compared to the midwest was not cool.