Back when Mrs Heathen and I tied the knot, we had the mandatory Williams-Sonoma registry. We got lots of lovely gifts, and some dupes, so after gift orgy subsided we took our excess bounty to the local shop to reconfigure. After we got everything we definitely wanted, we had some excess, so we did something nobody ever thinks they’ll do: we spent a bunch of money on a very attractive stainless-steel garbage can that, even worse, takes proprietary bags.

I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but this thing may be our best and most useful wedding gift, and anybody who gave us something from Wm-S can lay claim to a portion of our ongoing thanks. Bachelor that I was, I refused to spend money on something I was only going to put garbage in, so I had a nasty white plastic can from Target. It was white, and seemed to attract stains. The new one made a huge difference in the style of the kitchen, and definitely signaled some grown-up-ness. Plus, its wonderful lid is so adept at sealing in trash odor that it’s no longer obvious what we had for dinner. It’s amazing, really, and means that you needn’t waste bag capacity by immediately emptying the garbage just because you threw away fish heads, for example.

So we like it.

Anyway, it came from Wms-S, but it’s made by SimpleHuman. A couple weeks ago, it broke. Not horribly, but enough to be annoying. The lid is a tap-to-spring open kind of affair, and the mechanism to make it spring open stopped working. The seal’s still good, but you have to open it manually, which means more gross things tend to end up on the lid. Mrs Heathen called to inquire about repair, and something wonderful happened.

First, she got a real human in about 45 seconds.

Second, the real human interrupted her story to find out our mailing address. “Why?” “So we can send you your new lid.” “Don’t you need a receipt or store or a credit card number or something?” “Oh, no. You should get your replacement in a couple weeks.”

Excellent.