Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a couch. We tried donating one to the Salvation Army years ago when we were living in Connecticut. At that time, in that location, they would only do pickups every third week or so. After passing the initial round of questioning, not unlike a college interview, they agreed to consider our couch. The day they were to come by with the truck and pick it up, we humped it out onto the porch. We’re not talking super modern furniture or anything here, but it was a very nice couch with clean upholstery. We just didn’t need it anymore.

So, the first time we dragged it out onto the porch, I came home from work and it was still there. I called them up and found out the truck had broken down. I dragged the couch back into our kitchen (closest room to the porch, and there was no way I would drag the couch all the way back into the living room – there was no longer any place to put it and it had barely squeezed through the varied twists and turns).

About three weeks later I rescheduled pick up and dragged the couch out onto the porch again. Again, I came home from work and it had not been picked up. This time, when I called, I found out the truck had been in an accident and the pickup had been cancelled.

Several weeks later, I called to schedule pickup for the third time. I was otld the truck was indefinitely out of service and I should continue to call weekly until they were ready to pick it up.

That night, after several months of tripping over a couch in my kitchen, I broke out a saw and took the thing down to it’s component parts. It went out in a variety of trash barrels the next day.

So much for charity.