High Volume

Those of us whose poison of choice was beer, I've discovered, shared yet another problem: disposing of the prodigious cubic footage of empties. You liquor drinkers may not be aware how many beers it takes to black out every night and how much sheer space they take up.

A guy shared at a meeting that he would drink in his car, and toss all the empties in the ditch up the street from his house. He thought this was very clever, of course, until his wife commented a few months after he got sober that the street was so much tidier since he quit drinking.

A speaker at another meeting lived in a condo complex, and there was a trash chute. He was on the third floor, and the chute was in an outdoor corridor visible from everyones' front windows. When he dumped his bags of empty Heineken bottles, it sounded like an atomic bomb when they hit the dumpster, and everyone looked out their windows at the noise. So, he started wrapping each empty bottle in newspaper. "Normal people don't giftwrap their empties. Of course not! I was the only one smart enough to think of it. Normal people never came up with my brilliant idea."

For me, we had a housekeeper/babysitter with a granddaughter who loved Hello Kitty stuff. The little girl somehow converted empty cans to Hello Kitty merchandise. So I saved my empties for the housekeeper to give to her granddaughter. One time I took the housekeeper home and I was invited inside. There were Hello Kitty bedside lamps, a Hello Kitty bedspread, a Hello Kitty lunchbox, Hello Kitty shoes, socks, shirts. For all I know, there was a Hello Kitty Porsche in the garage.