“Why couldn’t they see my appropriately placed and inverted Supercan?”

“Dear PoPville,

After years of hard handling by the DPW trash collection folks, my Supercan had to be replaced. The broken lid let the rain in, despite my duct-tape efforts, and then the lift bar was pulled out, so the can had to be lifted into the truck by hand. Okay, so I sprang for a brand new one — just $30 for us oldsters.

The new one arrived, and now what to do with the old one?

Put it at the regular trash pickup location, upside down, was the DC311 instruction from DPW, and they would come take it away in about a month. But when the day came, this message popped up on my phone: “the container services team . . . reported that upon their arrival, there were no containers available for removal, i.e., at the point of collection, empty, and flipped over.”

Really? There my derelict Supercan sits, empty and upside down, blocking half of my garage, where it’s been awaiting DPW pickup for a month, but is apparently invisible to them. And if for some reason they couldn’t see it, there was a phone number for them to call. Nope, nothing on my phone that day but political send-money calls.

Why couldn’t they see my appropriately placed and inverted Supercan? Beats me. All I can do is file another 311 collection request, and hope that this time they manage to come to the right place. And actually lay eyes on my poor old wheels-up Supercan. Hard to see how anyone could miss it.”