Wednesdays are garbage eve. Alex takes all three of our trash cans out to the street. We have a blue can for paper and plastic. metal and glass, a grey can for "garbage/garbage", and the green can for clippings, food, etc.
Alex carefully arranges the cans at the curb in front of our house. He puts them in a row, not too close to each other so that the garbage truck can use the mechanical arm to grab the cans.
Thursdays are garbage days in our neighborhood. I watch out my window from behind the lace curtain as my neighbor does his weekly thing of going through our garbage and moving the trash cans into totally different locations. He finds a piece of paper in the green can and he quickly re-assigns it to the blue can. He decides that a piece of cloth does not belong in the blue can so he relegates it to the grey (garbage/garbage) can.
I watch him for 15 or 20 minutes in total amazement as he goes through his ritual. In every other way, this is a normal acting man. Sometimes I call Alex at the office and say "Guess what he's doing?" and Alex will laugh because he knows exactly who "he" is, and exactly "what" he is doing.
Part of me enjoys watching this ridiculous activity, but part of me is annoyed. What if I threw something "unmentionable" into the trash? What if there were broken sex toys in there? What if I threw naked pictures of us in the trash? What if I threw the prescription bottle for the anti-psychotics in the trash? See my point?
You may know, but once you move your trash to the street for pick up, you have no legal "expectation of privacy". For any of you criminals who may be reading this, that means the cops, the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI do not need a search warrant. You might want to keep this in mind if you throw out trash that links you to nefarious deeds.
The worst part is, my neighbor leaves for work after Alex, and he gets home before Alex. After the trash is emptied, my neighbor lines up all three of our cans right in front of our driveway so that we can't get a car in or out of the driveway without moving the cans.
I don't like handling trash cans. I don't like looking at trash either. We've been here for over ten years. I expect my neighbor knows us a lot better than we know him by now.
My daughter thinks our neighbor man is a spy. I think he's more of a recycle OCD type.
He can certainly be both: a spy with OCD. I don't like touching the cans either, but I do like standing outside with the baby as the truck passes, so he can wave to the workers. They are the nicest people, just like the ones from my block growing up years ago.
ReplyDelete