How much mulch?

Yesterday morning, during our daily jog, we noticed a sign near a house being renovated that said “free mulch,” next to a heap of chipped wood particles. After another leisurely breakfast, I hooked up our small trailer to the car and we were on our way to pick up that precious cargo that we would use to replenish the carpet surrounding our trees, bushes and flower beds. When we arrived on the spot, we had already been beaten by a lady who was busy loading the back of her BMW X3. As I was turning around the block to better park my car and trailer, she asked my wife some pretty pointed questions, like “are you going to take several loads?” “Where do you guys live?” and concluded by seriously saying “don't you think it's unfair to come with such a big trailer to pick up that stuff!”

At first, we let her finish loading her brand new SUV (she used a large Home Depot orange bucket to do the job). We then picked up our share and took off. When we returned she was loading again, and this time, a competitive wind floated in the air. From where we were parked, we could see that she was committed to take as much mulch as she possibly could, hurrying and lurking from time to time towards us, parked in the corner. The recycling drama suddenly escalated when we came to haul our third load. Now, the tension was clearly palpable; this time she took her time to carefully arrange what seemed to be a blanket inside the cargo area of her X3 to maximize the volume(the rear seats had been folded all along.) She rolled down the passenger rear windows and after amassing her regular load closed the hatch.

It's only then that the situation reached a crescendo; she began pouring buckets of mulch through the passengers windows in an effort to fully fill up her car. She did that from both sides, extending her arms inside to spread the precious material as far as she could into the vehicle. For us, powerless spectators, this topping procedure seemed to last forever; the car was never full enough and she was evidently not going to leave us one sliver that she could manage to stuff into her four-wheel container. After an interminable wait, she finally took off. We loaded the remaining portion of the mulch while laughing at this ridicule mountain drama and imagining the time it would take our lady to clean up the mess inside her German sport ute...