Advertising? Or just Littering?

Picture this:

After a long morning of hunting for the best deals, a young mother leaves a grocery store, kids in tow, with a cart full of groceries. As she gets to her car, she carefully and patiently loads one screaming child after another into her car until all four have been buckled safely in their carseats. Then she goes back to the cart to unload the groceries into the back of the car while her impatient young children serenade her with snippets of screaming, "I want this," "Mama!" "Passie!" "Milk!" "I'm cold!" and the cries of a baby who needs sleep and nourishment. Finally, everything is loaded. The cart is returned. The kids have their milk, passies, blankets, and toys, and the doors are all closed. She goes around to the driver side, gets in, buckles the seatbelt and puts the car in reverse. Cautiously and carefully she backs the car out of the space and puts it in drive. As she focuses on the path in front of her, she finally notices it. The "advertisement" so conveniently, yet so annoyingly, tucked under her windshield wiper directly blocking her line of sight to the road. Now what? Does she stop the car and make the person waiting to pull into her now empty parking space wait for her to get out and remove it? Does she try to drive home with it tucked under the wiper? Does she turn the wiper on hoping it will just fly away into the parking lot where most of the others have landed after being tossed there by less distracted drivers who noticed them before entering their vehicles? What does she do??

If you couldn't guess, this "young mother" in the story is me. This happened to me this morning. So what did I do, you wonder? Well, I was irritated about it already because I think this type of advertising is very wasteful and unnecessary. Most people do end up tossing it on the ground to be blown away in the wind, littering the parking lot, streets, neighboring yards, and other landscaping that might be bombarded by these unnatural hitchhikers of the wind. Who actually reads those anyway? And when someone does, who actually calls the number or goes to the place it's advertising? So I saw it as I'm trying to pull away. I left it there thinking it would either blow away on it's own, or be stuck until I get home, and then I would simply toss it in the garbage. Well, about halfway home, it was starting to really annoy me. So I turned on my windshield wipers to see if I could get it to go away. It didn't. All that happened was that the wipers pushed it directly in the center of the windshield... where it stuck. I turned them on again. It didn't move. The wipers went back and forth over the top of the paper, which didn't budge. What now? There's this 5"x7" square right in the center of my windshield. It was blocking more of my view now than it was when it was tucked under the wipers at the bottom. So I turned on my washer fluid. Mind you, I didn't think this would actually work. I thought it would probably just wet the paper and make it stick even more, which it did, but it was already stuck, so why not try, right? Well it stuck. I got home without incident, and frustratedly tossed the advertisement (which was for some new age alternative church, by the way) into the recycling bin. Yes... I recycle. Serves me right, though right? I tried to get rid of it and add the litter that was placed on my car by someone else to the litter on the side of the road. It just figures that it would stick like glue and block my view. Serves me right! Nevertheless... it was still annoying, irritating, frustrating and even a little humorously ironic.