Chuck Out

Twice a year we have neighbourhood chuck outs.

The streets start filling up with detritus of Chinese manufacturing at least a week before the deadline, which is tomorrow I think. There’s this fridge magnet thing I keep losing with the dates on it.

And forget about the council website; it’s useless. I just checked … Homepage > ‘living’ > ‘resources recovery and waste’ > ‘recycling and waste services’ > taken to dodgy contractor site > skip popup offer of free plastic bag > ‘collection services matters’ > ‘bulk household service’ > ‘when is my collection?’ > enter number and street name > select correct address from table with no obvious instructions to do so > and finally the dates appear!

All the stuff – it’s not that the Chinese can’t manufacture well; it’s more that they specify cheap input materials that result in the products not lasting very long.

They do this because their Western customers are cheap arses that will only buy cheap shit.

When the plastic kids’ furniture, teak chairs and BBQs get biannually hoiked, we all wander around and pick up each other’s shit.

Net, net; we are ensuring genetic diversity in the Sydney cockroach population.

There are also professional modern day tinkers that collect the good stuff, that is more than ten years old and not made in China, and flog it at auction for export as antiques to China. I know because I have a good mate with a PhD who does this for a living.

These tinkers are very important because without their efforts the system would blow up. All that incoming Chinese material would eventually cause Sydney to sink into the fracking depths if it weren’t for the tinkers and their Hiace vans.

Milk crates; they don’t get picked up. Nobody wants them. Especially the blue ones. Don’t get me started on this one, except to note that there are now more unused milk crates in Australia than there are cows.

Around a day or two after the deadline some contractor’s truck comes around and picks up the really bad shit that nobody wants.

But they won’t take chemicals, paints, building materials, unbundled green stuff, unwanted cars, dead cats, and a list of other stuff as long as your arm.

Chuck out week resembles a cultural spring. People carting their stuff out to the footpath, or wandering around the streets, scabbing, discover that there are people in the other houses on their street. This is a great opportunity for some very old-school banal conversation.

The only other time this happens is on election day. Long lines of joviality, all declaring a lack of care and interest. Lots of talking to strangers. Me wondering, where do all these people live?

Yesterday we had both an election and a chuck out on the same day. By the end of the day the introverts were totally fucked from all that small talk.

I suspect that the most affected crawled up into bed with a hot milk brandy and took their pain away by watching the libs get crowned as the least obnoxious and marginally less corrupt.

When we get fully inserted into the Matrix they would do well to institute weekly elections and chuck outs in there. A happy operative is far less likely to want to bust out of thing and pull the plug.