Communal bin is always overflowing whether it’s a week the binmen are on one of their quite regular strikes or not. Litter blowing all up the street every day. Seagulls love it.
Bins are rarely collected on the right day. Recycling got missed a fortnight ago (it’s only every other week), and last time the did come they didn’t collect our glass.
Nothing but respect for the binnies from me, unglamorous and dangerous work, always getting looked down on by snobs, but probably would have one of the biggest effects on everybody’s lives if they all quit tomorrow.
Don’t know if this was a feature of everybody else’s schooling, but loads of teachers when I was at school would be like “oooh you’ll end up working on the bins/stacking shelves/in a petrol station if you carry on like this” when kids weren’t doing their homework or whatever. Cheeky bastards rely on those three occupations for their way of life more than anything else probably. And at the same time they were always getting the army in to recruit kids who wouldn’t get any GCSEs. Emptying the bins which everybody here needs emptying = bad, being shot in Afghanistan for reasons you don’t really understand and if you’re lucky being dumped back home at 28 with no idea what to do next and crippling PTSD = good.
I should have just got a job on the bins. The pay’s better and I’d know some hard blokes. And I wouldn’t have to pretend that I know what “rhetorical” means.
Same! My mam managed refuse collection for a local council for years and managed crews of binmen. It’s a hard and horrible job but they were brilliant people. It always made me angry the how disrespectful people were of the role and the people who do it.
Like, there was a family that would leave open dirty nappies in their bin and obviously the guys would take one look and refuse to deal with it, but this woman thought it was acceptable to ask another human being to handle actual shit because once it’s out of her house it’s not her problem? She (and hundreds of others) would call the council (my mam) and yell down the phone that she paid their wages and they weren’t doing their job.
Anyway, my two year old’s absolute favourite is bin lorries and binmen. He stands in the window on bin day and waves and shouts “I lub you binmen!” at them, so hopefully an overexcited kid brightens their day a bit.
Happy to report my bins were collected in full today, great work bin men, you are all wonderful! (I had probably done something wrong the time they didn’t collect the bin previously, they are generally great)