I went from high school to college to full-time employment with no appreciable gaps. I met my wife in 2003 and we have been together since. I began working for my current company in the same year, with only a single year-long Alaska-based hiatus interrupting an otherwise continuous stint. I once lived with the same roommate for four consecutive years, only to immediately transition to living with a different roommate for four more consecutive years. I have never been evicted or faced any sort of credit crisis or changed my identity or been on the lam.
And despite all of this seeming stability - or lack of a crippling instability, at least - I have somehow now lived at 13 different semi-permanent addresses in the last 14 years.
I have moved due to absurd lease-renewal terms, mandates from the United States military, evolving personal finances, and erratic about-faces in preference re: the ideal percentage of floor area covered by carpet. I have coerced my parents to pick me up in April from a nondescript 8'x10' room in Ann Arbor, make the 1,100 mile return trip to their house, and then chauffeur me back four months later to a negligibly more-descript 8'x10' room three-quarters of a mile from the previous one. In the past decade, I have changed addresses more times than I have gone to the dentist. I own things that are still tagged with enough moving company inventory ID stickers that they have begun to resemble that wardrobe trunk that Lucy got stuck in. When we begin our 25th month here in August of this year, our current residence will be my longest-tenured one since 1999.
So I am familiar with moving. I know it to inevitably leave casualties: the movers will not pack the 7/8-full bottle of rubbing alcohol that I bought after they wouldn't pack the last one, the fancy new kitchen's built-in microwave renders the stand-alone redundant, there is no way I am drying and folding that shower curtain liner, etc., plus I inevitably just amass a whole carload of stuff to voluntarily dump. I actually find this to be a perk of the process - one is less prone to absentminded hoarding when faced with a mandatory annual evacuation of every closet and drawer.
The kitchen trashcan succumbs to the purge maybe every other move, having acquired two years-worth of faint odors and tomato sauce stains that are wholly tolerable right up until the moment that I am presented the choice of loading this dirty, boring, cheap, and eminently upgradeable item into a moving van - right next to all of my clean non-garbagey stuff - vs. the poetic (and usually spectacularly noisy) Ouroboros of aggressively hurling the thing into a dumpster.
We ditched our last one two years ago. It was an unremarkable but perfectly suitable 5.2 gallon Sterilite Touch Top™ whose only fault was being owned by a spendthrift pseudo-gypsy who grew tired of its whole white plastic vibe. I regret it now (the ditching). Great can, that one. Stout. It wasn't even that dirty. But I know by now that this happens at least once per move - when, after all of that excessive clutter-cutting self-congratulation, I must eventually acknowledge that I have thrown out some perfectly good and quintessentially utilitarian possession because I was bored with its vibe, of all things - and I feel completely ridiculous.
So we needlessly bought a new trash can. And I do not care for it.
Procurement and Setup
I follow only one criterion when selecting a new thing to electively replace an old thing that did not need to be replaced: that the new thing be as different as possible from the old thing. This does nothing to ensure that the new one will be any better, and may in fact increase the likelihood of it being considerably worse, but in the moment, it is far more defensible than buying anything that resembles the perfectly good one that I just threw away, creeping regret be damned. So our must-haves for a new can described the opposite of the old one: Black. Metal would be nice. Something slick-looking. A little bigger (completely unnecessary). Maybe one of those pedal-operated lids I've been reading so much about.
Target has an entire aisle full of trash cans. The first half of it is stocked with familiar Sterilites, which I ignore; the second half is the "designer" section, where the ones with fancy styling and complex lid mechanics are available at a 100-200% cost premium. This is clearly where I want to be, as I have temporarily lost my mind.
The high-end models come packaged in individual boxes, made from the shiny kind of cardboard and decorated with well-composed photography and hip fonts. (To reiterate, in case you lost track and thought I was instead talking about a brochure for a condominium building, I am still referring to a container for a container for garbage.) One mid-range option looks to fit our bill - its box is printed with phrases like CIRCULAR DESIGN and MATTE FINISH and STYLISH ADDITION TO ANY KITCHEN and has a small window exposing the actual can, through which I tap one square centimeter of metal with an index finger and conclude that it "seems good". I quickly deem this level of research sufficient to justify spending nearly $40 on a barely-glorified bucket, doubling-down with a matching recyclables bin in silver (not matte, FYI).
It turns out that one handy benefit of selling your horrible overpriced trash can in a box is that the box hides all of the obvious shortcomings long enough for some idiot to buy one (or two). Overall build quality is dubious: the metal is thin, the base is a little wobbly, the lid is slightly askew from the body and makes a weird noise as it aligns itself while closing. Overall, I would assess it to be almost as sturdy as that giant can of hot chocolate mix we bought from Costco one time. There is a confusing metal hoop hanging off of the back of it, through which one might drape a hand towel or something, I guess.
Fitting it with a standard 13-gallon trash bag is a maddening test of patience and fine motor skills. I gather that the process is meant to utilize this dream-haunting plastic ring:
It fits snugly between the top of the can and the lid. Beyond this, I can confirm nothing about its intended use. Is the bag supposed to be fitted directly into the can with the ring pushed down on top of it like an embroidery hoop? Practical, but this leaves several inches of the top of the bag sloppily skirting out over the rim and negates the whole reason for shopping in the designer section (the slickness). Am I supposed to use the hinged metal parts to secure the bag? Possible, but the hinge-points interfere with the bag. My current method involves clumsily fishing the bag through the top and then wrapping the edges of the bag down and around the full circumference of the ring so that I end up with something like a handleless butterfly net, at which point I attempt to guide the entire bag/ring assembly into the can while maintaining enough tension on the bag to keep the whole thing from unraveling. I can typically do this in less than four minutes.
[At this point - after identifying their numerous intolerable faults but prior to soiling them with any actual garbage - you might ask why I did not repack the cans into their suspiciously stylish boxes and exchange them for a more practical choice, such as the larger (12.4 gallon) version of the proven Sterilite Touch Top™. The reason, of course, is that this would be a shameful act of weakness and an admission of failure, not to mention that the cumulative exasperation necessary to inspire a tightly-edited 2,300-word treatise about something dumb I did two years ago never really takes hold if I sabotage it with a regrettable spell of lame up-front humility. Where's the prolonged embarrassment and bitterness in that?]
Lid Operation
The can's weight is approximately equivalent to that of a medium-sized bag of pistachios. This is great if you want to take it backpacking but not if you are interested in it staying in one place while attempting to foot-open it. My preferred pedal-mashing motion is a rotate-about-the-heel sort. The resulting force has a horizontal component, resistance to which relies on the thing being heavy enough to create adequate friction with the floor:
To avoid the sliding, I could convert to a pure vertical stepping motion:
I suppose I also could have just put a rubber mat or something under the can, which I did not think of until just now.
Bag Removal
The curriculum of my sixth grade English class included Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about which I remember only three things: 1) Some dogs died in it, thereby meeting an apparent macabre requirement that all middle school literature feature at least one horrific animal death, 2) It made specific reference to a dog's disembodied intestines being dragged along the ground, a detail which I recall handling with precisely the level of maturity one might expect of a twelve-year-old boy, and 3) It described a way to trap raccoons wherein something shiny is placed inside of a sort of reamed-out Erlenmeyer-shaped hole in a log, with an opening small enough for the raccoon to get its open paw through but not big enough for it to get its clenched paw out, which works because the raccoon will grab the thing and then be stuck forever because it is too stubborn and dumb to just open its paw and let go of the washer or Werther's wrapper or whatever.
I am reminded of both #2 and #3 whenever attempting to extract even a moderately-full bag from this can, which has evidently been outfitted by a world-class team of frustration engineers with a subtle but suitably catastrophic opening constriction (plus a few random screw heads and metal edges for extra bag-grip). The raccoon trap analogy would be more accurate only if the hole in the log was lined with spikes like a sarlacc pit and if the paw was instead an impossibly thin plastic sack stuffed with two-week-old leftover spaghetti. But the guts-dragging-on-the-floor thing ultimately turns out to be a pretty spot-on visual.
I acknowledge that this specific shortcoming could have been anticipated by browsing the unanimously horrible reviews for the product on Target's own website, which reviews I did not seek until I started writing this. Highlights include: "It takes eight arms, ten minutes, and an engineering degree to remove an even semi-full bag without tearing holes in it", "Just now I watched as my wife struggled to get a bag out. She needed both hands and one foot, and still had to flail around to get it out", "I have yet to empty our trashcan without tearing the bag", "Not worth your trash", "The stupidest thing I've ever bought", and "A few times I have had to remove the bag and insert it into another bag due to all the tears", the final word of which could be interpreted in at least two valid ways. I would typically be inclined to dismiss this sort of bad press via the Nobody-Gives-a-Trash-Can-Five-Stars Corollary of Online Customer Reviews, but it is validated here by embarrassing consistency - 14 of 17 reviews make specific reference to Bag Removal Rage, and the only one awarding even 3/5 stars does so with the caveat that he just forgoes a bag and hoses the can down every time he empties it - plus the existence of alternatives with stellar reviews, not to mention my own daily fantasies of smashing this thing like drunk Eli Thompson in a garage crazily pummeling that poor guy with a wrench during Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire.
But I resist that sort of violence for now, instead just making occasional visits to the Sterilite section at Target for a bit of wistful old-can nostalgia. We will move again soon enough. And when we do, there will be a party with hockey sticks and snow shovels and a spectacular piñata de basura.
Summary
Pros:
- Slick vibe
- Opaque construction visually conceals the grisly slurry of coffee grounds and fish parts that is going to be all over the floor in a few minutes
- Bonus rock storage
- Good starting point for homemade toddler-sized costume (cigarette or AA battery)
- While adequate for holding trash, does not allow for any reasonable means of putting trash into it nor taking trash out of it
- Is no Sterilite, that's for sure :(
- Is terrible
Overall Score: 700
All reviews utilize their own unique scoring scale, each with no reference datum and extending infinitely in both directions.
