At work tonight, a customer asked me a strange question: he wanted to know whether or not my first “Obamian week” had gone well. I must admit, I wasn’t sure what to say. So I replied that so far, I hadn’t noticed a lot of change — I was trying to be ironic and quirkily funny, and pretty much expected to hear a rim shot, but the guy just stared at me.

“It takes time,” he said with exasperation before clutching his bag of apparel and sulking off, sans receipt.

Really, what did he expect me to say? It’s been a week of Obama’s presidency, and while I’m as psyched as the next individual, I can’t imagine anyone whose life was turned around miraculously since last Tuesday — or at least, in connection to the political standings of our swell country.

And here’s the thing: I’m really not a “politics” sort of person, and please don’t throw rotten-produce-type e-mails at me for admitting this — I went to the IMA to get ripped in lieu of watching the tube on Inauguration Day, and was primarily concerned with what Michelle Obama was wearing to the event — that woman is a stylish firecracker.

My customer, though, put some thoughts into my head — change does happen slowly, but since we’ve been putting all of our eggs into the Obama basket of change for I’d-rather-not-think-how-long, why not add some changes I’d like to see personally? For instance, I’d like my garage to no longer be filled to busting with garbage.

Let me explain. I do not live in squalor and filth, and receive regular compliments from guests concerning the neatness and home-like quality of the dwelling place of my housemates and me.

We do, though, have a skeleton in our closet. By closet, I mean garage, and by skeleton, I mean absolute mountains of random cardboard, Ikea furniture packaging, Bed Bath & Beyond recyclables and countless paper grocery bags filled with sorted plastics and glass — these mainly hold the tubs from yogurt and ricotta cheese, cans from crushed tomatoes and beans and bottles drained of beer and wine.

With dignified shame, I admit that our garage is useless because of this astonishing hoard of sorted recycling.

“However did this come to be?” an appalled reader might ask themselves. Well, here’s the problem: When we first moved in September, we did an insane amount of cleaning. Beth and I learned how to replace a linoleum floor — the old, moldy, rotting one chipped up and in bags somewhere at the heart of our garage. With five people, we brought epic quantities of material possessions — the vast majority belonging to me — all in boxes I’d been nicking from shipments at work for months.

With an additional burden of ludicrous piles of garbage, we were unable to get everything disposed of appropriately with our weekly trash pickup. It really didn’t help that we missed the garbage and recycling men for our first three weeks in Northgate.

So we made the upstairs a vision from Better Homes and Gardens, and then created a cozy den in the basement. And as we generated trash and recycling, we just went through the utility room and dumped it in the garage. There was even a really dark period when the garage was so full we proceeded to fill the utility room.

Since then, the situation has improved slightly. We have slowly incorporated the garbage into our offerings to the garbage man, and Duncan works diligently every week to sort, organize and commit recyclables to their proper bins. However, it appears that the biweekly recycling pickup will never catch up to our drinking and purchasing of things packaged in cardboard. It’s really depressing ­— though our utility room holds our two fake and forcibly ignored Christmas trees and our garage is down to recycling only, it is this last pile of dreadfulness that haunts my dreams.

The housemates and I need this to change. We watch TV and see the people who needed a superhero and found Obama. They’ve put all their hopes and dreams in his hands, and sit there worshipping him for the news stations to capture, and I’m all for that — if it means an empty garage. That’s the change that would mean the most to me right now.

Reach columnist Matthew Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.