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my neighbor loves trash
Dec. 16th, 2010 07:54 amToday is trash pick-up day in our little townhouse community. I put out our garbage and recycling bins last night. This morning I go out to bring in the newspaper at 7:30 and what should I find but a neighbor woman engaged in the heavy exertion of trying to stuff cardboard boxes into my recycle bin. Judging from the way they're overflowing already, compared to how much I'd put in last night, that must have been a lot of boxes.
She's caught. She says something about just trying to get them in there. "Well, as long as they fit," I say dubiously, since the way she's going on, they're not going to fit. "Don't you have your own recycling bin?" No, she says, she doesn't. (I don't know why: the city distributed the current generation of bins just a couple years ago, and there were enough for everyone in the complex.) You could call the city and get one, I say. Yeah, she says, she should probably do that. And considering how many boxes she has, she definitely should. "Please do so," I say, and go back inside.
Should I have gotten angry at this usurpation of my God- and municipal-government-given recycling capacity? I suppose I could discover this morning that there was a bunch of stuff that I forgot to put in the bin last night, and feel rather put out that I'd have to wait till next week to recycle them. But I did put my stuff out last night: it's not as if she were occupying my designated parking space, which wouldn't allow me to use it at all until whenever she decided to leave. (Room is cramped on the inside of the complex, and all of us living inside have reserved spaces. There's plenty of extra space outside on the street.) It does feel inchoately as if my privacy is being violated, but I'm not sure if I could defend that feeling.
I suppose the worst that could happen is that some hypothetical garbage snooper comes to false conclusions about my trash. In an earlier era, we had a separate bin for aluminum cans and glass bottles. We used so few of these that I only put the bin out once every few months, at which time it looked as if we'd just had a big, but actually imaginary, party.
She's caught. She says something about just trying to get them in there. "Well, as long as they fit," I say dubiously, since the way she's going on, they're not going to fit. "Don't you have your own recycling bin?" No, she says, she doesn't. (I don't know why: the city distributed the current generation of bins just a couple years ago, and there were enough for everyone in the complex.) You could call the city and get one, I say. Yeah, she says, she should probably do that. And considering how many boxes she has, she definitely should. "Please do so," I say, and go back inside.
Should I have gotten angry at this usurpation of my God- and municipal-government-given recycling capacity? I suppose I could discover this morning that there was a bunch of stuff that I forgot to put in the bin last night, and feel rather put out that I'd have to wait till next week to recycle them. But I did put my stuff out last night: it's not as if she were occupying my designated parking space, which wouldn't allow me to use it at all until whenever she decided to leave. (Room is cramped on the inside of the complex, and all of us living inside have reserved spaces. There's plenty of extra space outside on the street.) It does feel inchoately as if my privacy is being violated, but I'm not sure if I could defend that feeling.
I suppose the worst that could happen is that some hypothetical garbage snooper comes to false conclusions about my trash. In an earlier era, we had a separate bin for aluminum cans and glass bottles. We used so few of these that I only put the bin out once every few months, at which time it looked as if we'd just had a big, but actually imaginary, party.
