So I exchanged propane tanks (on recycling)

11/4/2022

I stopped by my local U-Haul this evening to get my propane tank filled, for the weather portends lots and lots of porch nights yet to come this fall. The kid working there by himself who I think I've seen in the same situation isn't certified to refill tanks.¹ Well, bummer, but the valve on my tank was probably just dandy but felt a little wonky anyhow so I decided to exchange it rather than wait for the next day despite no imminent need.

The good part of that is that just about any gas station has a rack of tanks outside ready to go. Downside: it's approximately twice as expensive is it is to refill a 20 pound tank but what the fuck do I care? I'm getting paid for two jobs right now,² I'm splurging.

When I got home and before I fired it into the patio heater³ I had to pull the cap off that denotes a fresh, full tank. My natural reaction was to take a look at it to see if it was recyclable. Not deliberate, but instinctive. Imagine my glee when I found out it was a ♶. So cool, that goes into the recycle bin rather than the trash.

I'm far from militant about recycling. I mean, I'm not going around telling everyone how great my digestive tract feels since I gave up meat and started looking for places to drop off my glass but I do find myself looking with slight disgust on the clods who rather than drop their paper plate or soda bottle in the clearly marked recycling receptacle drop it in the immediately adjacent trash can. To be clear, I can muster up that slight disgust for clods pretty easily. Hey, I said "recycling receptacle". Need more be said?

Recycling simultaneously is and isn't easy to do. It's like Schrodinger's moral responsibility. Yeah, my borough stopped accepting glass in their single stream and I'm okay with that. I did, in fact, start saving my glass and finding a drop off spot and it does make me happy that there's now a permanent drop in the neighborhood. Problem is (well there are a few.... let's make this bullet points, shall we?)

It's not difficult to be of sound mind and good intention and still not know what you can and can't recycle in the single stream system of your neighborhood. I'm drinking a Murphy's, aluminum can, you can recycle that, right? Except you can't. Well, you can, but first you have to rip the can open and remove the nitrogen charger widget (I DO NOT recommend trying to dissect a beer can when you're loaded. Sheet aluminum is sharp.) or else the poor schlub that's working the line at the recycling facility is going to pick that up and toss it in the trash. I'd venture a guess that the biggest offender is plastic shopping bags. Yes, they're recyclable and I do, but only in specific places and not through the usual single stream pick up. My neighbors⁴ and a majority of people in general toss these in their recycling bins and it makes me feel a little pity for the slightly disgusting clods. Great callback, eh?
A few months ago I put holds on my credit at all three bureaus. After a few different letters telling me, or rather Cheryl Doe but at my address, that my credit application was unable to be processed online and I should stop into a branch. Firstly, I don't think there either a Bank of America or Bank of Montreal branch nearby and I wasn't particularly impressed with their resonse to the suspicious activity that they clearly encourage you to report. I don't mean to disparage our vaunted financial institutions but only because that's low hanging fruit.⁵ So, what does that have to do with recycling? Fuck, this whole thing should just be footnotes and flowcharts. I'll admit that I really thought it was a little silly when my ex bought a paper shredder to run anything sensitive through. I'm slowly coming around on that idea as I've come around to make things that I thought made my ex silly (sorry pal, you know it). About the same time the weirdo denied credit application stuff went down I spied some shady looking character walking down the sidewalk at night peering into recycle bins. So could it be that some jabroni grabbed one of the umpteen thousand pieces of credit offer junk mail out of my shit and tried to apply in their name but still using my address? Sure it's possible. Objectively dumb and short sighted, but let's face it, most of us have made bad risk/reward choices without regard to practicality.⁶ We're still talking about recycling. Promise. Let's go find another bullet point right about now.
Lets face it, literal tons of it just winds up in the trash anyhow [citation needed]⁷. Would it be helpful if we were a little more explicit about what can and can't be recycled? Sure but it's probably less useful than teaching kids in high school about financial planning so let's pick our battles. Now here's a struggle for me, that person who's getting paid to stand all day and watch your shit come down the conveyor belt...⁸ It's not a job I'd seek out, but it's gainful employment and that's something to be truly thankful for. Someone has job security because most of us are too inept or too indifferent to follow instructions. Wait, they're quite convoluted and annoying? Shit, we should talk about that sometime.
I'm single, I live alone. In the two weeks between recycling pick up I rarely have enough recyclables to justify taking the bin out. Hell, I don't even toss a full trash bag every week. However, it's an inevitability that at the end of two, two week cycles (that's four weeks or a month if your TI-93 is out of batteries) that I'm overflowing with recycling. If someone can explain how that happens I'll buy you a sandwich. A fresh one at that. Or even better, if you want to come over and help me modify the volume of my recycle bin by X^% (shit, my TI-93 was dead, too) I'll buy beer and pizza.
Then after we have beer and pizza a fabricate weird shit for no reason I'll recycle the empties and pizza box. We got back to recycling again at the end there. Pretty boss, right?⁹

¹ So, what does that process look like?¹⁰ Who issues that certification? Is it corporate or is there some kind of local, state or national governing body that is assuring that some incompetent hack isn't sending customers home with a ticking time bomb in their car? Perhaps the other motivation is to be sure that said incompetent hack doesn't dump a thousand (or so) gallons of liquid propane all over the ground. If it were my propane I wouldn't want to throw it away at $4 per gallon, but I also expect that pouring a thousand gallons of propane (heretofore referred to as LPG) could have lots of negative consequences. I'll save that investigation for another day.

² I resigned from the last job at a large-ish company just about two months ago. The boss formally accepted my resignation on the 27th of August with HR CC'd on the email and I punched out for that last time on September 9th. Still getting those direct deposits every two weeks. Moral quandary? Sure. But the consensus among everyone I've posed the question to is that they're incompetent, I fulfilled my duties, shut the fuck up and make it rain. Or maybe I'll hold the status quo and not go on a spending spree and or sell the computer and monitors they'll probably want back when the right person figures out they're in the hands of a former employee. Meh. My real concern is that as some point they're going to come back and say (big bob voice) "we put a lotta money into your 401k and health insurance son (yeah, it's still active)". Two of the pals I asked for opinions are lawyers so if they don't see an issue, who am I to complain? Get bent moral compass!

³ File under "fuck, that was a totally worthwhile purchase".

⁴ Yeah, I'm totally going to have a conversation about the minutiae of plastics recycling with Mr. "because of that great president we have" next door. What if I need a cup of flour some day?

⁵ If dick and fart and TWSS jokes ever cease to amuse me, it's over. Start picking shit out around the house and put your names on whatever you want because the end in nigh. I'll make sure to amend the will to say that anything with a name written on painter's tape and stuck to it has been rightfully claimed.

⁶ No, I haven't started using the shredder, but I do stuff the sensitive stuff way down into something that fully disguises it. Really. So now my credit offers are like the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box except it's a Ritz cracker box and the crackers are gone. Damn good they were.

⁷ Thanks Randal Munroe and What If 2.

⁸This reminds me that sometimes if I've gone through a lot of beer on the back porch³ in a two week period that the person who picks up my recycling is going to judge me by the number of empties. Maybe I should buy bottles, I know where I can drop them off now.

⁹ I'm so into saying "boss". If you made it this far drink two and help me bring the word boss back, k?

¹⁰ Oh, it's OSHA 1910.110. How the fuck did I not know that and how the fuck did I think I wasn't going to wind up looking it up eventually?