By Jim Hagarty
2015
I have been running this winter and trying to get my mile under the four minutes (just joking, the only thing of mine that runs is my nose), so I needed a timer. I dropped into my local surplus store and bought one. It doesn’t work. I opened it up to check the battery and a little piece of metal fell out.
Now this thing didn’t cost me much, so I threw the receipt in the recycling and was going to toss the timer in the e-waste bin next time I see one. But it kind of bugged me that it never worked even one time and never would.
The week went by and every day I thought about this. Would I dump out the recycling bins and search through the debris for the receipt? Or just let it go? I decided to let it go. Still …
This morning I hauled three large recycling bins (the ones on wheels with the lids) out to the curb and after the truck went by, I went out to bring them back in. The recycling guy had emptied all three and stacked them upside down, one on top of the other. I took them apart, set them back on their wheels, and prepared to pull them behind the house again. As always happens, a few stray recyclables were left behind on the ground. A couple of water bottle caps, a small advertising brochure and – a receipt. I turned over the little slip of paper and was shocked to see that it was the receipt for my crapped-out little timer. How in heck could this possibly be?
Things like this don’t happen to me often, but when they do, they drive me nuts. Those three bins were jam packed with recyclables of every description including fine paper by the fistful and so many receipts it was embarrassing. In our family, we apparently like to buy things. But in this instance, even the consumer gods were disturbed that I had been ripped off for the price of a timer and weren’t going to let me get away with not taking it back.
So tomorrow morning, timer and rumpled receipt in hand, I will be back in the store, righting the great wrong that has the Universe so upset it left me a giant clue showing how it felt about it.
By the way, the timer cost $1.99 plus tax. I don’t know why it was a piece of junk.
