Drive-through events are still part of our temporary normal, so when my community held a disposal event, it was bring what you plan to dispose of (paper for secure shredding, electronics, etc.) in the trunk of your vehicle and drive in and out without having to exit your car, allowing designated personnel to unload the junk for you.
It’s always nice to have somebody eliminate one of two steps when you have to transport something in your trunk. Getting it in there is half the battle as it is. I hemmed and hawed about taking the handful of items out of the house and putting them in the trunk to take to the event; after all, I still had a few more I could have added. The stuff included some deceased DVD players and clock radios, and still left to go to electronic waste heaven was a VCR and a pair of old non-digital TVs.
The problem with a clutter removal project is that, if you don’t finish a big job in one day, you often have a still big pile of stuff to set aside for the next day you have to finish the task. I ended up with half a mountain of it, and the rest of the items I would have discarded were on the other side, taunting me like a pot of. . . .well, it isn’t gold (it’s worthless).
Anyway, I decided to do what I had waiting for me to do, set the items in my trunk and headed to the event. The initial line had passed, so I pulled up right away, and grabbed my car’s remote to pop the trunk.
The whole thing went downhill from there.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about cars by owning them and tinkering with them in case something came up that required knowledge beyond on what side the gas cap was located. I’ve mastered the hood, washer fluid, oil reservoir, and the usual miscellany in every vehicle. Until this one, which I’ve had for six months.
My car has so many safety features, I suddenly found myself a victim of my own ride’s overbearing rules of the road. The thing I was not prepared for was the fact that one cannot pop the trunk of the vehicle if it’s turned on and running. This makes drive-through a more difficult process. When I couldn’t open the trunk with the remote from the inside, and had no button to open it other than that on the remote, I handed the remote to the attendant. He also could not do it from outside the car, so I tried to turn off the ignition. My car responded by telling me that my remote was not with the vehicle, and it refused to shut off. I had to retrieve the remote from the attendant, turn off the car, then hand him the remote back. While he popped the trunk, I received a message that I couldn’t turn the engine back on without the remote. Meanwhile, two or three vehicles were waiting behind me for this dreadful mess to be over. Fortunately nobody honked at me or became a Karen about it.
With the trunk empty and my remote in hand, I finally departed, glad for a car that won’t let me move without being focused on the road, but rather embarrassed that going forward with removing clutter was going to be an exercise in complicated procedural folderol. Maybe by the time I am ready to dispose of the rest of the junk, I can haul it around without being part of a car conga line or needing a remote in hand.
Open the trunk, Hal.
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