The mystery of the ice-chest swap

The city of Austin schedules "bulk collection" for each neighborhood a couple of times a year, where you can put just about anything out on the curb and the city will take it away. What actually happens is that everyone drives around looking at stuff, and if you see something you like, you take it before the city truck gets there. I think this is great -- better than recycling, easier than Freecycling. It always interests me to see which items of ours get picked up beforehand and which are left for the city to cart off.

Our neighborhood is scheduled for bulk collection this week, so my husband and I dug through the stuff in our garage and put out a few items: my 14-year-old laser printer, which finally gave up the ghost a month or so ago, sadly; his dilapidated old office chair; and a broken styrofoam ice chest. My parents left the ice chest at our house a few years ago when they drove here for a visit and brought us some treats that needed refrigeration. I am all about reusing stuff as long as I can, so we took the cheap disposable ice chest on several road trips until the lid broke sometime last year and we bought a more durable little ice chest.

The old styrofoam ice chest was from Wal-Mart. It had "Wal-Mart Supercenter" printed in big bold letters on two sides. I felt weird about putting it out on the curb. We're RG4N supporters, my husband has done a lot of work for the group, and we like to go to the weekly protests on Saturday mornings. In addition, a big red sign in our front yard reads "No Wal-Mart Supercenter" (as shown in the photo). I was worried that having a Wal-Mart ice chest on our front yard made us look like hypocrites, and was tempted to use a Sharpie to add a "NO" on each side of the ice chest. But then I decided that was ridiculous and no one would notice or care. (The photographer part of me notes that if I'd seen this scenario in someone's yard, I would have taken a photo myself.)

That was Sunday afternoon. About an hour later, someone had grabbed the office chair. But on Monday when I got home from work, everything else was still at the curb. I did the usual post-work stuff around the house: checked email, gave Rufus the cat some attention, blah blah blah. I ordered take-out for dinner, and as I walked out of the house to my car, I noticed something weird -- the ice chest was in my driveway, behind my car. It didn't seem windy enough for it to have blown over there, but Texas weather is bizarre. I walked over to pick it up ...

and it was a Randall's ice chest. (Randall's is a grocery chain in town.)

I picked up the ice chest, perplexed. It was nearly identical to the other chest, with nothing seemingly wrong with it. In fact, it appeared to be in better shape than the Wal-Mart chest, although it now had no lid whatsover, not even one split in two. I put it back in the original spot for our bulky collection and noticed someone had also taken the laser printer, but left the printer's paper tray. I used the paper tray to weigh down the ice chest so it wouldn't blow around.

It's a mystery, one we will probably never solve. What happened to the Wal-Mart ice chest? Did someone pick it up, decide it was in better shape than the Randall's one (which they probably picked up from someone else's bulky collection), and pull a switcheroo? Did a loyal RG4N supporter decide it was unseemly for us to have a Wal-Mart ice chest in front of our house? I showed the ice chest to my husband when he got home, and he was equally mystified. Strange things happen during bulk collection week, I suppose.

By Tuesday afternoon, it didn't matter ... someone else picked up the ice chest and the printer tray. At least the city will have less work to do.

Posted at August 1, 2007 08:17 AM