By Ken Lass
So the other day we received a mailout post card at our Trussville home. It was an advertisement for a service called Can Carriers. For a fee, someone will come to your house the day before your trash gets picked up, roll your garbage cans out to the street, and then the day after pick-up, they will come back and roll them back to your house. The ad specified their service was ideal for those out of town on vacation, or those who own a second home, or elderly and disabled folks.
Ken Lass, Tribune columnist
Then it went on to say the service is also for “individuals with long driveways”. I took that to mean residents who are just too plain lazy to drag their own cans out to the road. In other words, people like me.
Life has never been better for us procrastinators and lethargic lumps of idleness. We can now pay someone not only to take out our trash, but also mow our lawns, trim our hedges, buy and deliver our groceries, bring our favorite restaurant food to our door, clean our house, plan our vacations, walk our dogs when we are away (or when we are home for that matter), park in your driveway and give your dog a bath, even search your backyard and clean up the dog poop for you. Yep, this is the golden era of task delegation. Not worrying about these chores allows us to focus on more important functions, like watching football, scrolling through your Facebook wall, and trying to figure out how to take a selfie without distorting your face so that your nose doesn’t look like a ski jump ramp.
I am always amazed and impressed by entrepreneurial types who have figured out how to make money by just doing the little jobs homeowners don’t want to bother with. I would never actually want to do that kind of work. I’m not that amazed and impressed. But apparently you can make a living by capitalizing on the lethargy of others. Clearly, that good old American work ethic is still alive and well. It’s just that, in my case, it seems to be on life support.
I have one tree in my backyard. It’s a willow oak I planted when we moved in to this comfortable Trussville subdivision back in 1989. It was shorter than me, about five feet tall back then. Thirty-five years later it has exploded into a massive, regal canopy, capable of shading the entire half-acre of my back property. It is a majestic sight to behold. Except for this time of year. The time when the autumn winds whip through the sprawling branches, causing what seems like billions of those small, helicopter-like seeds and leaves to plummet to the ground. Leaves that, sooner or later, have to be raked and bagged and set out to the curb. It is the job I most hate every year.
I’ve noticed some of my neighbors attack this problem by mowing over the sea of leaves with a mulching blade. I’ve tried this, but it only seems to result in more billions of smaller leaves. The distance to my curb, and the multitude of leaves, makes it too difficult to blow them to the road. Ultimately, I always wind up raking and bagging and toting enough garbage bags to choke a landfill out to the street. I mentioned this to a friend at church recently, and she told me her house is surrounded by trees, and her leaves pile up relentlessly in the fall. When I asked her if she had to rake them up, she replied “Heck no. I call my leaf guy and have him do it.”
Leaf guy? There’s a leaf guy? Well, why not I guess. If you can hire someone to roll your garbage cans out to the street, surely there is someone who will rake your leaves. I need to get this guy’s number.
All of this does make me wonder just how far the abdication of simple household and personal duties will go. In the future, will I be able to pay someone to load my dirty dishes into the dishwasher? Change the TV channel for me? Give the grandkids a bath? Pull the footrest out on my recliner while I sit on it?
No, that’s just silly. I would never reach that degree of laziness. Just ask my wife Sharon, who is typing up this column for me.
