Trash Collection, or, Why is My Dog Insane?

I won't pretend to love the routine of the garbage truck passing through the neighborhood. It's loud, slow-moving, and, well, you just know that once in awhile, garbage is bound to get spilled onto your front lawn. But other than that, I don't mind it - in fact, I appreciate the removal of icky materials from the general vicinity of my house.



My dog is another story. Now understand, my dog is about fourteen pounds heavy and full of fluff - in other words, far from ferocious. So there he was, sitting quietly in bed, doing his usual lazy thing, when all of a sudden the garbage truck came rolling down the street. And suddenly, bam - my dog was not having it. He started barking and yelping towards the window, as if the garbage truck operators would somehow pick up on his distress call and say to themselves, "Hmm, the little white dog is bothered; we best clear out of here."

When my spoiled little doggy didn't get what he wanted, he started getting fierce - well, as fierce as a fourteen-pounder can get. He started lunging for the window, growling his head off. Of course, there's no way his mini-growls could ever reach the ears of the garbage collectors, leaving happy old me to deal with his insanity for the duration of the trash pickup.

I tried coaxing the dog towards a bag of treats I keep strategically stashed away for these types of situations. Nope. Didn't work. The sneaky little bastard took the treat, ate it, gave me a look that said "I can't believe you fell for it," and hopped back over to the window to continue the barking assault.

As luck would have it, my block has apparently been blessed with the garbage collectors who want to be really good at their jobs, because twenty minutes later, they're still here, and my dog is still barking. Coincidentally, I have not gotten any "real work" done for the past twenty minutes, which is fine, I suppose, since I'm no stranger to laziness, but is still kind of annoying nonetheless.

Anyway, it's not really too big a deal because I know that at some point, the collectors will move on and my dog will eventually be silenced...until Friday, when they come back and we get to do this again.