December 7, 2004

Swamped with Holiday Gift Catalogs? Be Aggressive

One Town Inundated after Passage of Mystery Ordinance

Thank goodness, the holiday catalog season is drawing to a close. Soon, I can return the fork lift to the rental yard.

A few days after Columbus Day every year, I rent a forklift and fasten a large metal bin to the forks. I park it at the foot of the driveway next to the mailbox.

Each day when the mailman arrives, he backs his delivery van up to the bin and uses a scoop shovel to transfer my family's holiday gift catalogs into the bin. Later, I drive the forklift to an area adjacent to the garage where a 40-cubic-foot roll-off sits. I raise the bin high up into the air and dump the catalogs into the roll-off.

In recent years, It took about five days at the height of catalog season to fill the roll-off. Then the refuse company would come with an empty roll-off and take the full one away.

What's a roll-off? Oh, you know. You've seen them at construction sites, a giant metal box the size of a boxcar. They fill it with refuse, winch it onto a truck, haul it off to a landfill, and dump the contents.

Throwing all our holiday gift catalogs into a roll-off worked well until this year. But at some point last summer, the town supervisors passed a new ordinance that requires all residents to actually look at each holiday gift catalog before throwing it away. It is an extraordinary piece of legislation, when you think about it.

No one, including the supervisors--two Republicans, two Democrats, and one Libertarian--seems to know how this ordinance became law. Some direct mail lobbyists attended several supervisor meetings last spring, though no one seems to know why. The town clerk remembers reading the Omnibus Ordinance Bill before submitting it to the supervisors for a vote, but she doesn't recall the holiday gift catalog paragraph.

It sounds disturbingly like the Congress in Washington where -- if you can believe what you read in the newspapers -- legislation that gets passed is never read by anyone who actually stood for election by the people. Same in our town apparently.

So we seem to be stuck with the requirement that you look at each catalog before tossing it. Unfortunately, not that many folk around here are upset with the ordinance. Three of the five supervisors are on record as saying they like to look at holiday catalogs. So a repeal seems unlikely any time soon.

Whether direct marketers had anything to do with enactment of this ordinance or not, it has caused a tidal wave of new catalogs. The word must be out -- our town is a "must mail" site. Where a 40-cubic-foot roll-off would take five days to fill in years past, it now takes a mere two days.

Fortunately for the mailman, this season they equipped him with a new, larger van that has a robotic arm with a claw at the end. It's like using a dredge in a swamp. The mailman scoops up catalogs from a huge bin at the back of his van with his claw and drops them into my bin on the forklift.

When catalog season began, I vowed like a good citizen to at least glance at every catalog. That lasted about two days. Next, I took the position that merely touching a catalog would constitute looking at it. After further legal parsing, I decided that scooping up an armload of catalogs out of the bin on the forklift and throwing them into the roll-off is the same as looking at them.

Finally, I discarded any notion of being a law abiding citizen.

Each night, I set the alarm for 2 a.m. I rise, put on my woollies, and head for the driveway. I start the forklift -- it makes a terrible racket, must wake the entire neighborhood-- and dump the bin full of catalogs into the roll-off. I drive the forklift down to the mailbox and position it for the next catalog delivery. And then -- back to bed.

So far, not a single neighbor has complained, no one has reported me, and the cops haven't caught me in the act.

Like I said, soon I can return the forklift to the rental yard -- until next year.

Copyright 2003-2004 William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions
All Rights Reserved
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