How We Got Our New Herbie Curbie

It was here when I bought the house, more than 20 years ago. Big enough to hold a couple 30 gallon bags full of trash, it was olive green and on wheels so it could be rolled down to the curb for trash pick up. It had a lid on it, and a metal bar that attached to the truck somehow and by which the bin was picked up and emptied when the City came by to pick up the trash. They are called Herbie Curbies (not to be confused with the trademarked Herby Curby®) and in Atlanta we've used them since the 1970s.  Sometime a few years ago the lid disappeared after a weekly pick-up and Kathy and Steve gave us the extra wheeled bin they had since they no longer had a tenant in their apartment.  So our old one without the lid went into the back yard.

At some point the City adopted an updated version of the bin that doesn't have the metal bar for a handle and is brighter green, in the same style as the new blue recycling bins.  Most of our neighbors have the new ones, but we still had the old-style one that Kathy and Steve had given us.  Or we had it until August 6, when it disappeared.  Tom called me at work and told me that the bin was gone, and he thought it had been taken with the trash collection.  He had talked to one of our neighbors, and there did appear to be some history of Herbie Curbies being taken by people on other streets who had not managed to get their own.  It seemed more likely that the guys who picked up the trash had just tossed it in the truck and driven off.  Tom called Alex Wan's office and the person he talked to there sent a request in to Public Works for a replacement.

The next day we had our National Night Out event, which was attended by someone from the Mayor's office, and from the office of the City Council President, along with a lots of police officers (including two from the APD's Mounted Patrol), and some firefighters from Station No. 19 along with the truck.  I mentioned the missing Herbie Curbie in my blog post about our NNO event, and in response to that, someone in the neighborhood emailed me with instructions on how to request a new one from the Department of Public Works.  So I sent a request to them by email on August 11.

In the meantime, we still had the problem of where to put the trash, so we hauled the old one that had lost the lid out of the back yard, even though by this time it also had a broken wheel. When we put it out the following Monday, it looked so pitiful I took a picture of it.

That day -- August 13 -- they did empty it and even put the dislocated wheel back in place.  It still didn't have a lid, but we could roll it around now that the wheel was back where it should be.  So it seemed like it would be okay until we got our new one.  It wasn't, though, because when the trash got picked up last Monday, that one disappeared, too.  Tom said something to Steve about it that evening, and Steve had an old one in the garage that he brought over for us to use temporarily.

That day, August 20, I had gotten an email from the Department of Public Works acknowledging receipt of our work request, and asking us to allow 7 to 10 days to receive a status update.  On Tuesday I called the phone number listed the email from Public Works and asked what we needed to do to actually get the trash container replaced, since it had now been a couple of weeks.  The person who answered the phone checked the records and acknowledged that they had a request for us dated August 6 (that would be the one from Alex Wan's office).  She apologized for the delay and said we should have a replacement by the end of the week.

As it turned out, we had one by the end of the day.  They came that afternoon with a new container.  It is beautiful, the green twin of our blue recycling bin.  It has our house number stenciled on the side.  And Tom said that when they delivered it, they took the one Steve had let us use.