Decision Making

I greatly enjoy that Tuesday is garbage day.

This is not because I like taking out the garbage.

I have always disliked taking out the garbage.  In college taking out the garbage was one of the contentious chores between the roommates: we all hated doing it and unlike mopping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the shower, or wiping down the stove, we couldn't ignore it for entire school years at a time.  Living in a seven-person apartment made the garbage situation even more unpleasant, especially because the various randomly-assigned roommates who filled the spare bedrooms when true friends were gone for some semesters tended to do things like fill an entire trashcan with pizza boxes and beer bottles and then disappear into their room never to talk to us again for eight months (yes, that happened).

But taking out the garbage became a new height of difficulty after I graduated and lived alone for the first time.  The trash in college was an unpleasant game of chicken where someone would eventually decide nothing more could balance on top of the can.  Living alone, the issue was not volume.  It was smell.

To explain this I might need to explain a bit of how engineers think.  I don't have experience with it personally, but I imagine normal people make decisions based on a few straight-forward axes.  "What do I want to do?"  "What do I need to do?"  "If I want to do it, can I do it?"  "If I don't want to do it, can I delay it?" Etc.  Engineers have an additional criteria which complicates everything else.

Efficiency.

Efficiency can by itself be variable.  Do you want to be efficient in time usage?  Cost?  Effort?  Engineers know that it is unlikely you can have all at once, so the decision become which type of efficiency is more important in any given situation.

Left alone to my own devices, the garbage became a problem of inefficiency that I couldn't solve.

The main problem was that I didn't generate enough trash to fill the can before it began to smell.  I deemed it inefficient to take out the trash before it was full.  This is because taking out a partly full bag of trash was inefficient in all variables - time, cost, and effort.  I would have to take the trash out more often.  I would have to buy more trash bags.  And the trash bins were far on the other side of my complex, down a flight a stairs.

So the smell became the enemy.  I tried freezing food scraps to prevent them from rotting in the trash, but some scraps inevitably made it to the trash anyway.  I tried buying the odor blocking crystals touted by the radio morning show I listen to.  I tried buying scented trash bags.  I tried buying scent-blocking trash bags.  I tried double-bagging the trash can and then tying off the inner bag when it started to smell.

Nothing worked.  I was left with an inefficient system where I played chicken with myself of how long I could stand the smell of the trash.

I lost that game, over and over.

But now that I moved, Tuesday is garbage day.  Tuesday is the day the truck comes to pick up the garbage, so Monday is the night I have to move the trash cans to the front.  And since I have to move the trash cans to the front, I might as well use that day to take the trash out from the house.  There is unlikely any true efficiency benefit, since I spend more time taking out the trash, and I take out partially full bags of trash more now than ever.  But my perception is that I am "getting my money's worth" much more by having trash in the bin at the curb each week so that my $17 a month doesn't go to waste.  Monday comes and without question, I will empty the recycling and the trash into their bins and wheel them to the curb.

Sometimes I just really, really, really like to be told what to do.