[QUOTE=Pithy Moniker]
…I’ve assisted with cleanups for situations like this as I mentioned up thread. The first few times, I would show up with gloves and trash bags expecting to bag up and throw away massive amounts of paper trash. Everything except the most obvious food wrappers had to be inspected before it was tossed away. An old cardboard soda case might have a phone number or address written on it. My suggestion to put them into some kind of electronic format and then throw away the trash fell on deaf ears.
After an hour or so, I wouldn’t be doing much more than holding a trash bag open for someone inspecting the items. An entire Saturday’s work with 4 adults might only manage to clear a portion of a room under such circumstances. I’d usually leave with an odd mixture of frustration and sympathy.
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I helped clean up after an earthquake once, literally.
The big Northridge earthquake, 1994, a friend’s co-worker was allowed back into her apartment for 1 day only. I was with 6 other people who showed up. We brought 3 pick-up trucks and a huge trailer.
No after a disaster you expect some disorder in a person’s home, but this was off the scale. The lady’s adult daughter was a “renowned poet”, yeah, ok, whatever. She had made a cassette tape of a certain radio show for the last ten years. This was a 2 or 3 hour show 5 nights a week. Over 3000 cassette tapes of just that show! She also liked other shows. The cassttes had been stacked up in her bedroom and had settled into a wall-to-wall pile as deep as my thighs. I started grabbing boxes and shovelling tapes into them. The “poet” was crying and telling me to stop so she could organize. the funny thing was, not one single tape was labeled. How was she planning to organize? By looking at each tape and spending 10 minutes stacking 20 tapes onto the lid of a box, then pausing, then re-stacking.
So, seeing I was not needed in that room, I tried to help in other areas. We loaded the trucks with 14 unopened boxes of a set of dishes (place-settings for eight), 6 giant metal 1950’s office desks, 19 dining room chairs, over 50 contractor-sized garbage bags of unused clothes, toys, lamps, over 20 unopened boxes of dixie cups, 5 unused coffee machines and then I stopped counting. It was as if God had picked up a K-Mart, shook it, then set it back down.
All the time, while trying to get this stuff out, the mother and daughter were crying and frantically trying to “organize” weverything. This entailed looking at every box and making a seperate stack with no disernable logic on the yard. Even to the point that if a box or bag caught their eye that was already packed in the truck, they’d remove it and lay it down on the lawn.
We made 4 trips to a rented storage warehouse. We had become so disillusioned that by that time we didn’t even bother to stack the stuff up in any orderly fashion, just dumped it into a big pile in the middle of the warehouse.
Bear in mind that the mother was not a trailer-park goon, but one of the top paralegals in Century City. My understanding is that the warehoused goods sit undisturbed to this very day, and that her new aprtment was quickly filled up with more junk.
Later on I read in the paper how the daughter thanked evryone in the poet community for all the help and support she recieved during the crisis. Funny, I don’t remeber a single poet showing up to actually help empty her apartment. Darn poets.
When it was all over, I read in the paper how the daughter wrote a piece in the local paper thanking
