Weird Garbage Issues
March 15th, 2007 by PotatoThere’s this house on my walk to work that’s always seemed to have… issues… with their garbage collection. Usually, there’s a lot of left-over, odd pieces of trash on their lawn, and it looks like the raccoons quite often get a chance to pick through their garbage. Today, there’s a ripped-open bag in the middle of their lawn that’s been there for almost a week now. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to see why, exactly, they do so poorly with a task so simple as putting your trash out for someone else to take away. As I was walking up the street, I saw a girl come out of the ground floor unit, put her trash on the curb, and go inside. Just a few seconds after she got in, the guy in the second floor unit came out and hurled a bag of trash off of his balcony out in the general direction of the street (it landed on the lawn before the sidewalk, and remains there today). This was in the morning too, which gave the animals lots of time to pick through it before collection the next day.
Now that the snow has melted, that block is just disgusting. There’s a vast swath of debris stretching half a block now laid bare by the thaw. That block is made worse today because sometime last night somebody had an egg fight or something: two dozen eggs are thrown all up and down the street and lawns along that block.
I just don’t really understand people’s weird garbage issues. Like we’ve had all kinds of weird crap thrown into our parking lot. Beer bottles, of course. Tonnes of beer bottles. I mean, I still don’t really understand beer bottles: they’re reusable/recyclable, you can get money for them, and they’re dangerous when broken, so why go around throwing them like idiots? Of course, drinking the beer in the bottles makes people idiots, so they throw them anyway. I don’t understand it, but at least it’s not hugely unexpected or weird. No, we’ve also had all kinds of weird things in our parking lot: a pumpkin smashed… in December. Food, and not take-out food from people just walking through, either. Like dip or something from one of our neighbours’ kitchens. A while ago, there was a smashed inkjet printer there, which is just kind of wrong. The other stuff I could maybe see a really stupid/negligent neighbour maybe out on their balcony with a bottle of beer and a bowl of dip, and then deciding to chuck the dip over the fence when they’re half done just because they’re too lazy to bring it inside to throw out. But a printer? There is no possible scenario where someone is hurling a printer over a fence to save any effort. That’s just malicious, spiteful littering. Since it was over the fence, they couldn’t have even really seen it smash into little bits, which is about all the entertainment value in throwing a printer that I can see. Today, there were socks. Wayfare decided that enough was enough: we had been good-natured about some of the weird ass shit showing up in our lot, but chucking socks is just too strange: they’re not gross enough to be spiteful, but not hard enough to throw away properly to be lazy. It’s just retarded. So she threw them back over the fence. By lunchtime, another, different sock had materialized on the deck.
I really hope these kids go home to live with their parents for the summer.