Sunday, February 21, 2010

Shopping Cart Wrangling

RantWoman has to admit, cough, that RantMom is not the only person she knows with, er, shopping cart issues . RantWoman herself also lives in a building full of just the sort of charitable and enterprising souls who regularly bring home stray and not so stray shopping carts.


Shopping carts tend to congregate under an overhang near the breezeway of our main entry. This seems mostly a sociable arrangement. The shopping carts are with their own kind, mostly out of the elements. The shopping carts are available for others who need shopping carts.

RantWoman admits, with just a twinge of embarrassment that shopping carts are exactly the thing for RantWoman's occasional sorties into her building's laundry room. RantWoman considers herself VERY lucky to have assembled enough underwear and passable daywear to be able to go quite a spell without visiting the laundry. RantWoman usually even manages to procrastinate a day or two or three beyond when the realization that she needs to do laundry crystalizes, but when L-day finally, irrefutably arrives, there is just no substitute for a shopping cart.


Play ominous music.

Enter the new manager at RantWoman's building. New Manager generally has a spiff things up, run a tighter ship view about many issues. We have lovely new metal grating benches and drmatically reduced tolerance for smoking on our breezeway. Owners of a number of pathetic automotive heaps are being told to either license their wrecks or ship them out.

New manager is also making it clear in no uncertain terms that she is reluctant to become a shelter for homeless shopping carts and in fact will deal quite sternly with anyone seen bringing such onto our property. There is also some issue from the fire department about possible fines for obstructing hallways, not to mention all the ways for people to trip.

Worst of all, though there are promises of some shopping carts reserved specifically for needs such as RantWoman's, though RantWoman specifically asked before her most recent bout of laundry wrangling, there seem to be no alternatives to the thinning straggle of contraband shopping carts now accumulating in a different place. So RantWoman did her laundry with a contraband shopping cart she found already ensconced at the new location.

RantWoman's laundry ritual requires not only a spell for travel to and from the laundry room, but also a spell as a drying rack for things RantWoman is reluctant to entrust to the dryers. Alas, by the time the ritual was complete, the door to the new storage location was locked for the weekend, and RantWoman has had a contraband shopping cart in residence for a few extra days. If RantWoman were TRULY virtuous, she would have walked the visitor back to its home domain. Yeah, right. Virtue is overrated!

No comments:

Post a Comment