Our garbage service is on Tuesdays. We haul our can and our recycling bins out to the curb every Tuesday morning, and by the time I get home later that afternoon, they are all magically emptied. The garbage man never let us down.
There was a time when all that changed, though; when I would get home to discover our can had NOT been emptied. I find this very annoying.
I would look around, and my neighbors' cans would be empty. What's wrong with my can? Why did the garbage man leave MY garbage behind? I knew he'd been there. Empty cans all around me were evidence of that. Yet he had either missed my house somehow, or he'd intentionally ignored my garbage. To tell you the truth, the thought of it being the latter kind of hurt my feelings.
I'm sensitive that way.
So anyhow, all this happened about a month ago.
That next Tuesday morning, I decided to do P a favor and put the can and bins out before I left for work (I usually let him do it when he leaves, which is around 8 a.m.).I was dragging out the now over-full can and recycling bins, when I saw the garbage truck approaching. It was 6:00 a.m. in the freaking morning! NO WONDER they didn't pick up my garbage the week before. My can wasn't out at 6 a.m. in the freaking morning. My can was still snoring soundly in the garage.
Well, NOW we put our cans out there the night before, so there's no way that sneaky garbage man (the one who gets out of half of his work by showing up in the middle of the night) can miss it.
And that leads me to yesterday, which was Tuesday. At 6 a.m. I was loading B into the car, my cans having been hauled out to the curb the night before, and I see the garbage truck approaching. So it's a pattern for sure, I've figured. And I look around and there are many of my neighbors who haven't put their cans out yet.
Do I go door to door, frantically knocking and alerting them to the fact that their garbage isn't going to get picked up unless they get their behinds out of bed and haul their cans outside? No, that would be crazy!
No, I just smile smugly, knowing that some lessons have to be learned the hard way. Am I a bad neighbor?
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