Valet Waste
They’ve been making some changes at my apartment complex: painting buildings, fixing the pool, charging to use the racket ball and basketball courts, requiring residents to register their cars. There is a sign on the main office building that reads, “Pardon our progress.” It’s like saying, “Excuse the mess.”
Now, as a special new service for their residents, they’re offering Valet Waste Services. When we got the first flier about it last month, my husband was not happy. “People are so lazy they can’t take their own trash a few yards to the dumpster,” he said. “Is this the reason they raised our rent $200?”
Two weeks ago, a black trash can appeared at our door with the words “Valet Waste” written on it in white letters. The instruction sheet it came with tells us to keep our “Valet Waste” trash can inside during the day, and not to put it outside until after six in the evening. “Leaving your trash can outside will result in service interruption,” it reads. The can is too big to fit under the kitchen sink, where our old trash can is stored. We don’t have any where else to put it so we leave it outside. Our service is yet to be interrupted.
I checked out the Valet Waste website. On the website they say that the trashcans are ergonomically designed to fit in any apartment. They need to redesign those cans because they don’t fit in my apartment. How do you make a trash can ergonomic anyway?
Trash collection is promptly at eight. There are a lot of buildings at this complex. In order to have everyone’s trash picked up promptly at eight, they must have a worker collecting trash at every building. That’s a lot of workers. On their website they claim that this adds to apartment safety. That depends on who their employees are.
Before we had Valet Waste, I used to see people leave bags of trash on their cars for half the day before they lazily drove the trash to the compactor. For them, Valet Waste is just what they needed. I liked taking out the trash. The short walk was nice, but I’m using Valet Waste because, whether I use it or not, I’m still paying for it. I just take longer empty-handed walks now.
