by Douglas DeBono, 2006

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT StandingOrders.BlogSpot.Com, August 16, 2005

My Bride decided that we no longer needed the sleeper sofa--a wonderul piece of furniture constructed from cast iron and steel.

She arranged with a charity to come by and pick it up. My task was to get it to the curb.

No problem! I'd forgotten how much it weighed.

My son and I wrestled the sofa through the front door. He looked down the drive to the far off curb, voicing the concern, "We're going to carry it the curb?"

Have you lost your marbles!?!

I told him we would stick in the back of the Expedition (Eat your hearts out you Eco-Freaks!). The sofa fit with room to spare. We delivered it the curb. Mission accomplished!

Right?

Wrong.

The charity never showed up. Maybe they knew how much this monster weighs. So we shoved it back into the Expedition, and off I went to donate it to the Good Will.

The fellow in receiving looks over my treasure. I tell him its in fine shape (it really is). We start unloading it and he discovers it is a sleeper sofa.

"We don't take these," he informs me.

"You don't?"

"Policy," he explained with slight British accent.

I'm starting to get a bit desperate. Off to web I rush and look up the Salvation Army (they'll take just about anything). They had a map plotting the location of the drop off warehouse. I guess I expected the people running the website to generate accurate maps.

Following these directions led me to the topless bars downtown. I circled several times, before I found another building marked Salvation Army. It was buttoned up like Fort Knox, and assessing the neighborhood, I figured retreat was the better part of valor.

Back to the maps! My new location took me by the bottomless bars into the warehouse district and eventually to right location.

They started making noises like they wouldn't take this wonderful sofa off my hands, and I started looking around at bridge underpasses where I could dump it.

In the end they took it.

"Do you want a receipt?"

I shook my head, smiled and gunned the Expedition back to my sedate suburb.