Several years ago, when I was heavy duty into community service projects, I volunteered to allow members of my civic organization to drop off aluminum cans at my house to be stored on my back porch and later transferred to a recycling center where we could collect money for them to be used to benefit the community in some way.  I had huge plastic garbage bags of the cans on my porch in a relatively short period of time, so I needed to hurry them to the recycling center so we could still walk back there on the porch.  When I tried to load all the bags into my van, they wouldn’t fit, so I got the idea that I could decrease the size of the bulky bags if I just crushed the cans and rebagged them.  I already had all the bags out on my driveway as I opened one bag, dumped it out, and started stomping on the cans, one at at time.  It was taking me a long time to make very little progress, but I had another bright idea.  I could just run over the bags with my van, and the cans would be flattened with little effort.  So, I carefully piled up the remaining bags behind my van and backed over them.  Just to make sure I had gotten them all smashed, I ran back over the bags with my van in drive and then backed over them again.  I’m sure some of them got flattened, but a good deal of them just rolled out of the ruptured bags all over the driveway.  Still, I rolled back and forth with the van over the remaining bags again and got out to investigate.  Again, some were flattened, but most were just loose and rolling.  So, I stomped a few more and then got a shovel out and tried to scoop them all into a pile again.  Then I rolled over them once again and got out with the shovel to round the stray ones back up.  Of course, I stomped a few, too, while I was out.  I worked at this project for a good 20 minutes before I just gave up and bagged them again and put as many of the bags into my van as I could fit and went on to the recycling center.  I really hadn’t thought any more about my morning activities that day until a few weeks later when one of my neighbors had a party and invited most of the neighborhood to come.  I was in her kitchen with some neighbors chatting when I heard the folks in her den erupt into hysterical laughter.  The guffawing got even louder, so we all wandered in there to see what was so funny.  They were all watching the TV screen, and there I was on tape, attacking aluminum cans like some demented maniac.  It seems that my neighbor directly across from my driveway had just happened to look out as I had started hauling out the bags of cans and trying to stuff them into my van.  She was amused enough at my antics that she shouted for her husband to come and bring their camcorder.  They had the whole crazy episode on tape.  I must admit that I was funny to watch, especially if you didn’t know what I was trying to do, first stomping cans and then running them over with the car and then shoveling them up and stomping a few more and attacking with the van again.  I was happy to be the comic for the neighborhood, and I only got a little concerned when my neighbor told me she’d sent a copy in to America’s Funniest Home Videos.  She told me that she was just kidding about that part, but if she had, we might have both gotten rich!