Where's ya bin?

The place I live provides bins in the shared carpark area. There are 8 apartments in this block. We each have one rubbish bin and we share two recycle bins. The normal rubbish day is every Tuesday. The recycle day is every other Tuesday. It works out really well for me and any other normal person. The garbage bins easily hold 2 to 3 weeks of rubbish so it doesn't matter if you forget to put it out one week.

The recycle bins easily handle all the recyclable rubbish for us if used correctly. Unfortunately, the people that live around me are idiots. The whole rubbish thing raises my blood pressure way more often than it should. For more than one reason.

Firstly, other people forget to put out their bins. For more than 3 consecutive weeks. I wish this was 100% true but sadly it's not. They don't forget. They're TOO FUCKING LAZY. They have to walk or drive past all the other bins on the street to get home so it's not as though they can be blissfully unaware that it's bin day. They just can't be bothered to walk. Hang on, wait, I'll brb. OK, it's 39 short steps from the bin depot to the street. 15 seconds walk. And they can't be bothered.

After all, why should they? When their stinky rubbish is overflowing they know all they have to do is start using MY FREAKING BIN. The one that's always almost empty because it somehow gets emptied on a weekly basis and I generate half the rubbish of a normal person. This pisses me off.

The thing that annoys me even more is the recycle bins. Oh, where do I begin with these beauties?

a) General household rubbish does NOT go in the recycle bin. I appreciate it's really tough to know what to do when your own rubbish bin is overflowing, and the big sign saying "Cardboard, paper, tins, glass ONLY" is SO difficult to comprehend, but seriously people, are you inbred?

b) If you have a large cardboard box then you're right to put it in the recycle bin. But how about tearing it up or compacting it first so that you don't use the entire volume of the bin with one large empty box?

c) Again, the bins do not empty themselves. I have taken one of the shared recycle bins out every recycle day that I have lived here and been in the country. I have recovered one empty recycle (usually the only one) bin from the street every post recycle day and restored it to it's position (next to the other overflowing one) without exception. There are 8 of us using them, this doesn't seem right to me.

d) I have recently begun taking out one bin and leaving the other in the middle of the driveway so that no vehicle can enter or leave the premises without dealing with it. Every time it has been pushed to the side of the driveway. This really is the height of laziness. It's more effort to position the bin to get your fucking car past than it is to push it out of the already open gate and onto the street!

e) This one is minor, I should be grateful: Very occasionally someone else will take out a recycle bin. And plonk it right in the middle of the normal rubbish bins. Do you not realise how annoying this is for the garbage truck guys? They have one truck that picks up both bins but they have to use a different hook thingy for the recycle bins. It's so much easier if they can do both recycle bins, change the hook and then do the plain garbage. Not to do two garbage, one recycle, two garbage, one recycle, 2 garbage. That's just plain annoying for them. I'm not a garbage man but I can easily understand how infuriating it must be.

I feel better for moaning. If I'd not done so I may have been contemplating whether ripped off body parts go in the recycle bin or plain garbage.

PS. Tt actually took a photo of the recycle bin once with nothing in it but a large piece of flat cardboard inserted diagonally to prevent anything else from being inserted and which also stopped the lid closing. She found it funny because I took one look at it and exploded with fury. She was planning to blog about me and my bin thing but it never happened. Now I can't find the photo. I guess even I'm not obsessed enough to keep a photo of a bin forever.... The sad thing is I've just spent 40 minutes looking for it.