Suburban Tales: Stray trolleys and sex toys

We can assume that you, the reader, spent at least a couple of years at some uni, where you probably flirted with socialism or at least tried on a Mao shirt once or twice to impress some annoyingly militant but deeply gorgeous young thing at some skanky student union pub crawl.

We can also assume this life of youthful exuberance also led you to spend at least one year in a tetanus-infested share house with people you couldn’t stand and a constant shortage of hot water. A place that would be in complete and utter disarray if not for the two canon storage solutions of student living: the milk crate and the shopping cart.

If you remember those days with any fondness, you may be interested to hear the Brisvegas City Council recently found itself auctioning off 8000 shopping trolleys collected from its streets.

The South West News reports that after getting gents in spiffy fluro vests to wade into creeks to rescue the runaway trolleys, the council found the carts’ supermarket owners weren’t willing to shell out for their return.

Instead, the council was forced to tender to get rid of this unwanted inventory.

The eventual winner was a scrap merchant, who bought the bunch for as little as $5 a unit. As Brissy’s lord mayor lamented, the likely fate for these trolleys will be to be melted down and re-cast as fresh trolleys. Presumably, these re-recycled carts will eventually be stolen, used again to store bucket bongs and Nick Drake CDs, before again being thrown into a creek.

In Melbourne, meanwhile, one cab driver had some excess inventory of his own.

What do you do when your taxi driver offers to sell you a sex toy? The Lilydale and Yarra Valley Leader heard this week from a woman who says she found herself in that unenviable position last year. She did what any sane and sensible person would do - get more than a little freaked out.

Sadly though, we’re in an age where just about every piece of public transport is plastered with ads. Likewise in the skies, nary an hour seems to go by without a stewardess asking you to buy duty free or pour loose change into your sick-bag.

Taxis can’t be far behind.

We thus recommend you combat this by introducing your own line of goods for the modern busy taxi driver. The next time a cabby tries to sell you something, dramatically open your trench coat and offer to sell one of the following:

A GPS, an manual on how to use a GPS, a working EFTPOS machine, a working pen, a working volume button, a working electric window switch or a pamphlet on how not to piss off three lanes of traffic with a dickish u-turn.

Lastly, in this shabby edition of Suburban Tales, we present to you the best online headline from around the nation this week. An accident with pants ends in fine screamed Perth’s Mandurah Costal Times.

We webby types generally try to make headlines boringly descriptive in the hope that some guy named Steve in Albuquerque will accidentally hap upon the page in Google. This headline, however, could actually be accused of being too descriptive.

The story itself recounts the fairly common nightmare scenario of finding yourself at a party sans trousers. In this instance however, the nightmare was real, and more closely resembled a drunken romp. 

Indeed, counsel for the main protagonist in the drama acknowledged that his client was trying to reduce his alcohol intake. Meanwhile, the police prosecutor enlightened the court with an explanation from the culprit, who declared himself at the time to be ‘a bit of a pickle’. 

We leave it to you, gentle reader, to decipher what he meant by that.

Folllow Suburban Tales on Twitter