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The Irony Of It All
Brad Hollerbach is the Director of Information Technology for the Southeast Missourian. His opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the newspaper or its editorial board.
He writes this blog primarily for his own amusement and to parody the absurdities of the world we live in. He lives with his wife and two cats that don't really care for one another in Cape.
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Unpacking A Wuss-mas Tree
Posted Wednesday, November 10, 2010, at 12:00 AM
My wife and I have a lot of artificial Christmas trees and I'm not sure why.
I'd be happy with just one, but my wife seems to like them. Hmmmmm. Perhaps, I just answered my own question.
Anyhow, we have indoor Christmas trees and outdoor Christmas trees. We have some tall Christmas trees and some short Christmas trees. We have a skinny one and a couple of fat ones. We have one or two with the lights built-in, but most don't have that feature. We even have some trees that aren't trees per se, but perform the same function of displaying Christmas ornaments.
It was a pair of the short Christmas trees that further solidified my opinion that this country is devolving into a bunch of wussies.
My wife asked me to retrieve two 3-foot tall artificial trees that were stashed in our basement so she could fluff them. Fluffing is a very important part of owning artificial Christmas trees.
I have learned that an artificial tree that comes straight out of the box looks bad. That's not surprising. These trees are typically packed into cardboard boxes so tight they defy the laws of physics. I've never been able to put an artificial Christmas tree back in the original box it came. They just never fit.
Instead for our very first artificial tree, I bought two large plastic totes to store it after the holidays. The other trees we've acquired over the years we just keep assembled, tucked away in a storage area.
The two 3-foot trees that my wife asked me to retrieve had never been opened. She bought them at the end of a prior holiday season and they were still in their original boxes. They even had a handle on top that made carrying them upstairs a breeze.
However, when I started to open one of them I noticed a "Team Lift" logo on top of the box. There was also one on each side for a total of three. You couldn't miss the warning.
"Team Lift For Your Safety" the logos suggested. They even showed illustrations of two people lifting a box, presumably the same box that sat in front of me.
Did I mention it just a held a 3-foot tall, artificial Christmas tree?
I suppose that there may be some 3-foot tall, artificial Christmas trees that are crafted out of lead and steel with bases made of granite, and might be worthy of a "Team Lift For Your Safety" logo, but I don't think these particular trees qualified by a long shot.
Out of curiosity, I weighed one of them.
It was less than five pounds.
To help put that into perspective, a gallon of milk weighs over eight pounds. I'll make sure my wife assists me from now on when I'm pouring the Prairie Farms on my Cheerios for breakfast.
After all, you can't be too careful with your safety.
UPDATE: Scratch That Last Blog. Still Mad As Hell.
In a blog last week, I recounted that the City Public Works department had failed to pick up my recycling on Monday because a car was blocking the trash truck. The car was obviously not ours; both my wife and I were at work.
Whomever was collecting the recycling was able to hop-out of the trash truck, jot down on a tag that a "car is blocking can," tie it to the receptacle in question and get back in the truck in approximately the same amount of time it would have taken to hop out of the truck, and move the can so it could be dumped.
That pissed me off.
However, later in the week I noticed that the can had been emptied sometime between when I saw it at lunchtime on Monday and when I got home from work that night.
I assumed the city had come back and dumped it, and therefore I could no longer be mad as hell at the Public Works Department.
OK, I have found out what REALLY happened.
The city did NOT dump my can. Instead, one of my nephews parked the offending car in front of our house. My sister-in-law noticed the tag on our can and had her husband deal with our recycling.
So, I'm back to being Mad As Hell, and eager to be the Parking Police for the street immediately adjacent to my property.
I've even got a couple of deputies, Bambi and Thumper...
Thumper (left) is reserved for the vehicles of any relatives who happen to park in front of my trashcans on a pickup day.
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