Etiquette Poll: Trash Day

Posted by Chad Orzel on October 29, 2010
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Chateau Steelypips lost power this morning for unknown reasons, preventing me from putting up the post I planned to do with lots of cute toddler pictures. Thus, a quickie poll in honor of the crazy person a couple of blocks away who sometimes yells at me for dropping Emmy’s bagged poop into her full trash cans while they’re at the curb:

As noted a long time ago, this would be a great opening scene for an episode of CSI (Call me, CBS. We’ll talk.), but beyond that, I’m kind of baffled at the yelling. Emmy doesn’t get it, either, but then she doesn’t understand why I pick her poop up in bags in the first place. “Humans are weird,” she says, “Give me a treat.”

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Comments

  1. #1 Eric Lund
    October 29, 2010

    How thoroughly bagged are Emmy’s droppings? From personal observation, the people who pick up garbage in my town aren’t always careful about how they handle trash cans and recycling bins, and I have no reason to think things are any different in Niskayuna.

  2. #2 andre3
    October 29, 2010

    As long as the bags are knotted closed (as I do with my dog’s poop bags), so no significant stool seepage can occur, it should be cheered. If the poop can fall out of the bag and dirty up the trashcan, I can see why someone may get angry.

  3. #3 Johan Larson
    October 29, 2010

    Some people are very attached to what is Theirs, and hate hate hate you for doing anything at all with it, even if your activity is innocuous.

    I’m not one of them. For example, it wouldn’t particularly bother me if people walked across my lawn, as long as it only happened occasionally. The picture changes, of course, if the infringement is likely to have substantial impact or is against intimate portions of my property.

  4. #4 Martin
    October 29, 2010

    Is your trash pickup funded by property taxes (or other local taxes), like mine is? If it is, then you’re each paying for each other’s trash pickup anyway. As long as the poop is securely bagged and you remember to close the trash can after each “deposit,” your neighbor is just being a jerk.

  5. #5 Adela
    October 29, 2010

    I get bitchy at people when they are too cheap to pay for their own garbage removal and try to pawn it off on us or when they stuff things that are violations of the bylaw into our garbage once again too cheap or lazy to dispose of it legally. Oh the joys of finding some git’s KFC take out garbage buried in your compost bin.
    Johan, in some places you can forfeit your property rights all together if you let people do things unchallenged.

  6. #6 CCPhysicist
    October 29, 2010

    Did your neighbor suspect you were discarding toxic waste or porn in her container?

    Are you more likely to use her trash can because she yelled at you?

  7. #7 Sili
    October 29, 2010

    If they pay by weight (as some do here), I can see why they’d be upset by your adding to their charges.

  8. #8 Mike Olson
    October 29, 2010

    If the dog knows physics it can figure out how to lift a lid and poop in the toilet like everyone else. I don’t want people pooping in my garbage can for the same reason.

  9. #9 stripey_cat
    October 29, 2010

    Our waste has to be bagged in big, outer bin-bags (the black sort) before it goes in the bin. Just wrapped in a small bag is not OK. Also, some things are not acceptable for the normal bins (I don’t know if dog-poo is excluded, but at my parents’, guinea-pig bedding was); and the occupant is the one who gets the fine if the binmen notice.

  10. #10 Rick Pikul
    October 29, 2010

    To place some caveats om my “no big deal”:

    Where I live, waste pickup is flat rate unless you’re putting out loose bags of garbage, (so no cost issues).

    I might remind them that pet waste should go in the GREEN bin, not the black one, (and definitely not ever in the blue bin).

  11. #11 MRW
    October 30, 2010

    I have mixed feelings. If it’s paid for by taxes and it’s very well sealed, it shouldn’t be a big deal. On the other hand, how do they know that it’s well sealed when they see you put it in? I haven’t found any loose dog poop in my trash can, but I’ve found plenty of loose rotting garbage that my asshole neighbors have put in it. To make it worse, the waste removal guys often miss the small stuff.

    In my case, it’s also not paid for by taxes.

  12. #12 John Novak
    October 30, 2010

    My thought is that as long as someone isn’t fouling the can (loose rubbish of any kind) or mooching (by somehow increasing my costs or unfairly lowering theirs) it’s just not an issue.

    This is the sort of thing that, I guarantee, would drive my father absolutely insane if he saw anyone doing it, whether it fouled the can or not. Dad could actually be that crazy person. But then, Dad also thinks he owns the curb space– that he never uses– in front of his house, in defiance of all local law. (That’s actually a pretty vile Chicago mentality that he’s dragged into the suburbs, and if I thought I could get away with it, I’d rent a steamroller and spend a glorious weekend demolishing all the chairs that people abandon on the curbs to mark the territory that they don’t actually own. But I digress.)

  13. #13 RW
    October 30, 2010

    I have several times found that my just-emptied cans contain loose trash that must have been put in by other people. It appears that the loose stuff slipped down the side of the big bags I use, and didn’t get emptied into the garbage truck. On a couple of occasions the loose stuff included dog poop, which — even when well-bagged — smells less than pleasant.

    I still don’t think she should yell at you though. Seems to me that your goal — a dog-poop-free world — is clear, and your honest error in pursuing the goal should be tolerated.