One of the major WTF?s when I moved to Minnesota was the fact I needed to choose a garbage collection company. Everyplace I’ve ever lived before, there was just one company (or the city directly) that serviced any particular area. Some places we got a bill, other places it was included in our taxes, but there was no choice involved.
Here, you choose a company. There are several different companies that service our neighborhood, and on trash day there are a stream of trucks from various companies that wander our streets. Sometimes people from other companies knock on the door and make special offers for switching companies. It is annoying and I don’t think it is very efficient, but hey, competition does keep prices down, and if you are willing to switch often, you can probably get really good deals because of the X amount free offers.
We use Suburban Waste Services. This week, Monday was President’s Day. When there is a holiday before your trash pick-up day, everything shifts by one day. So, we (and many neighbors) put out our trash one day later than usual. Our trash did not get picked up. At that point I went to look at their website (yes, I should have done it BEFORE) and discovered that President’s Day was not one of their holidays this year. I had missed trash day. From what happened with neighbors, it seems like some companies servicing our area shifted, and some didn’t.
This was totally my fault. They send out a schedule at the start of the year. I had multiple ways to verify when our trash day was, and I failed. It super sucked though, because we had A LOT of trash. Like, 5 person household, instead of our normal three, all the puppy related trash. Our trash can was overflowing, and overflowing with things that did not smell excellent.
We sent Suburban Waste Services an email explaining that we had messed up and put trash out on the wrong day, was it possible to arrange for a pick up still?
“We can get you picked up today, just leave it out and I will send a truck over. No problem, have a great weekend!”
Awesome. That is why I don’t switch to get free X when people knock on the door with offers. Suburban Waste Services has always responded quickly to our email queries, and they’ve always been helpful about any requests we’ve had.
They showed up so quickly to handle the missed trash pick-up, that I didn’t even have time to take out yet another bag of puppy gross. That will have to wait for our normal pick-up day next week, which we’ll be sure to get right.
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