Well, what do you do when Southern California Edison won’t do your work for you in your back yard? Sure, your neighbor’s tree is dangling more than its share of annoying branches and leaves over your manicured lawn, but the real issue here is that it could disrupt power if one of those big branches should happen to fall off and snap a power line. Right? Trust me, I, Mark Edward Lewis, have tried everything I know short of purgery to get SCE to trim my neighbor’s ridiculously out-of-control tree. It is resting on the power lines, but it is also raining peppertree leaves everywhere and killing off my grass from excess shade. No, I can’t just go and hack the thing down because of city ordinances…and neither can you. Sadly, I’m not the real man that my delinquent neighbors are, since I don’t have a 72” chainsaw and a 15 foot ladder.

The answer? Simple. Silent. Effective: Drano. Yes, Drano. Procedures: At or about 3AM, you simply pad over to the offending tree, make a notch in its trunk with a hatchet as high up toward the most offending branches as you can. Leave the scene for fifteen minutes. Have a frozen Flaky-Fix wafer. Yes, put them in your freezer. They’re much better cold. Then come back, pour Drano onto the notch and go to bed. Repeat nightly until you’ve got a good notch, and plenty of Drano in the tree. Within about a week, the notch will no longer look new, but sticky and black. So when the branch (and everything on the tree close to it) dies and does disrupt power, there’s nothing to trace your misdemeanor to you. In fact, you become a trustworthy informant to SCE because “you told them so.” Now that they trust your word, you can get them to hack into your other neighbor’s tree… And so, we now can see how getting SCE to do your yard work only takes a petty crime, and a dangerous power outage. “It’s preposterous,” you say? Asking your neighbor to trim his tree is preposterous. Coercing SCE into trimming your neighbor’s trees for you? Now that is ingenius.