Eye on Television

 

The story you are reading is true.  I’d say it happened just yesterday but then I don’t really know when you are sitting down to read it, so suffice it to say, it happened the day before last trash day.

 

We had a very old television in the back bedroom.  It was the opposite of a flat screen.  In fact I could barely get my arms around it to lift the thing and move it.  After some 35 years it finally quit working and so I figured – if I could muscle the thing out to the curb, surely the trash guys could hoist it up into the garbage truck.

 

I went to the basement and got my heavy-duty dolly.  There was no way I could carry the thing through the house and down the driveway; it had to weigh more than a Sumo wrestler after breakfast.

 

It had been wedged into an oak cabinet and so just getting it out of there and onto the dolly was a bit of a struggle. Once on the dolly it rolled easily down the hall to the front door.  I lifted it off of the dolly and carried just the dolly out to the base of the front steps and left the dolly there to put the television back onto once I was able to lift it and carry it out through the front door, across the porch and lower it gently back down.

 

I rolled it down the drive and set just the TV on the grass at the edge of the drive.  I carried my dolly back to the house and put it back into the basement.  Then I came up stairs to get my camera so I could snap a picture for this article of the TV sitting out there.

 

I stepped out onto the front porch with my camera and noticed the TV was already gone. 

 

Someone had already come by, scooped it up and driven off.

 

There was no need for me to worry about tomorrow’s trash guys not taking it because it exceeded the weight limit.

 

The only other time this happened was when we set one of those pre-lit Christmas trees out at the curb.  The main trunk of that tree was steel pipe and even though it came apart in sections, each section was incredibly heavy as each individual branch was also metal.

 

That time it was snatched up just as quickly but we did catch a glimpse of the person doing the snatching.  It was a middle-age woman in a Cadillac.  She was hoisting the sections into her trunk quickly and then hopped behind the wheel and drove off, as if she had been doing something wrong or perhaps just didn’t want the neighbors seeing her out trash picking.

 

Little did she know, we would have brought her out some eggnog and helped.