Blue Bin Virus

We live in a place that has “curb­side recy­cling.” Kind of a stretch con­sid­er­ing the near­est curb is 9 miles from here but… Every oth­er week we put a huge blue wheel­ie bin in the buck­et of the trac­tor and haul it down to the coun­ty road to be picked up. (The green bins are for trash and they go out every week.)

Being every oth­er week there are of course some Thurs­day evenings when the most press­ing ques­tion is “Is this a recy­cling week?” There’s a lit­tle cal­en­dar in the fridge that answers this ques­tion when we’re not sure.

A cou­ple of weeks ago we duti­ful­ly loaded up the big blue bin and hauled it out to the road where it joined it’s fel­lows. The next day on the way to PO I saw lots of blue bins care­ful­ly lined up along the coun­ty road — all as it should be.

Until Fri­day night (okay, Sat­ur­day morn­ing) when I took the trac­tor down to the road to pick up the bins. Uh, the recy­cling bin is still full. What’s with that? Hey all the recy­cling bins are full. Idiots did­n’t pick up, I hate that now I have to haul a full bin back and it’s full and we won’t have any­where to throw the paper… and you get the idea.

But before I go off all pissed on some poor phone-answering cus­tomer ser­vice dweeb maybe I should check the sched­ule. Uh… huh?… real­ly? It’s not a recy­cling week. Says so right here on the sched­ule. So what’s up with that?

I have got­ten the week wrong before and either not tak­en the bin down when I should or tak­en it down when I should­n’t. What makes this inci­dent weird is that so many peo­ple put out their bins on the wrong week. Not just the five of us who live up here on our (dirt) road but peo­ple all up and down the coun­ty road. It was a vast line of big blue bins. Why?

A lit­tle thought and a lit­tle house­hold dis­cus­sion answered the question.

Me: Did you check the cal­en­dar yesterday?

Him: No, did you?

Me: No. But every­one else had put their big blue bins out so I took ours to the road.

Just enough peo­ple made the mis­take of tak­ing the big blue bin to the road on the wrong day to start a cascade.

And a lot of those bins stayed right there in their nice tidy lines wait­ing for recy­cling week, next Thursday.

Thanks to Black Dog for the photos.