Someone's in for a rude surprise

I broke my computer chair over two months ago. I broke it on a day which happened to not be garbage night, the day of the week when all of the household garbage and recyclables are dragged out to the curb for pickup the next day. So the broken carcass got placed in a fairly inconspicuous location behind my back porch. It sat in this spot until last Thursday.

Periodically our city does "big garbage pickup" when it will take away a single large object at no extra charge. Usually this is a television, air conditioner, or other semi-major home appliance. For me, it was the broken remains of a five-year old task chair with a detached back and mostly snapped-off seat, all of which had sat through two months of Fall and Winter weather in my back yard behind my porch. I snapped the seat off all the way lest some industrious soul decide that he had come upon a perfectly good chair being tossed out by some wasteful fool. (Anyone who knows me knows that when I am ready to throw something out, it's garbage.)

Friday came and went. They took my brother's Christmas tree - his new house is in an area where they don't bother to recycle, or compost, or do anything other than pick up garbage, so he brought it to our house for a more proper disposal - but they left the chair at the curb. It sat there, forlorn, like the discarded lamp in Spike Jonze's Ikea commercial, bereft of its chair-ness, two useless cushions next to a broken pillar on wheels. I left it there, at the curb, in case the "big garbage pickup" was happening over the weekend. Or maybe on Monday. Plus, I didn't want to touch the damned thing without latex gloves.

Saturday came and went. The chair sat there.

Sunday. I went out with some friends for a few hours that afternoon. When they dropped me off at my house, I squinted at the object on the curb. Something was different. Missing.

"Where are the cushions?" I asked.

"The what?" they inquired.

"The seat. The back. They're...gone."

And gone they were. The wind was fierce this weekend, especially on Saturday night, but all of the broken bits of chair had still been there on Sunday morning, and even into Sunday afternoon. Now the cushion parts were gone: two plastic-backed pieces of fabric-wrapped foam that had been subjected to more than five years of me and two months of rain and snow.

Why? What possible use could the cushions be put to? Try using them as a seat and you'll find yourself sitting on a damp sponge, possibly full of bacteria and maybe even little critters seeking refuge from the cold. Maybe some kid is looking to customize a go-kart, or someone wants to use them for sledding. All I can say is: Yiccchhh.

I won't be surprised if the cushions wind up tossed back on my lawn.