Middle-Aged Men Only Want One Thing, And It's Disgusting

As a man approaching his 40s, I find that despite not having kids, I end up falling into a lot of classic dad traps. Will I read a shovel comparison in an off-road magazine despite never owning something with four-wheel-drive? Yep. Will I find myself looking at a newly constructed building and loudly exclaiming, “Well, that sure went up fast,” to my wife or my empty car? Also yes.

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One thing I haven’t done yet is go down the weird dad tinkering hobby rabbit hole, and that’s probably good because I suspect it wouldn’t take long for me to end up spending months to automate taking my trash cans outside like this German gentleman who built a little train – trains, also very dad – to save himself having to go into his narrow side yard once a month to move seven cans out for pickup.

I put my trash cans on rails and now they move automaticaly! (Trash Train)

Dad jokes aside – jokes about dads rather than “dad jokes” – this is a pretty ingenious solution to something that’s not really much of a problem unless you’re elderly, disabled or just very lazy.

There’s a lot of thought put into something that, on the surface, seems simple. He goes through several iterations of drive system and ways to tell the train to stop automatically, and he even finds a way to charge the 18-volt power tool battery that powers the trash train without having to manually get into the locomotive part and do it manually.

I mean, I laughed at the absurdity of this whole enterprise as I watched this video, but the more I think about it, I really do hate taking my trash, green waste and two recycling bins out to the curb. Maybe I should buy a stick welder and a bunch of wireless crap from Amazon…