Every Wednesday, the Wrong Bin

From the log

12/05/21 — Green bin out. Grey week. Third time.

19/05/21 — Correct bin. Note: he watched me put mine out first.

26/05/21 — Green bin. GREY WEEK.

On the log

I want to say at the outset that I am aware of how the log looks.

I started it because I intended to raise the matter with the council and I know from professional experience that you do not raise a matter with a council without dates. I am not an obsessive. I am a person with dates.

On the calendar

There is a calendar. It is delivered annually. It is also on the website, on the app, and on a magnet that they give out at the library.

Green is garden and food. Grey is general. They alternate. This is not a difficult system and I would like to state clearly that I have never once heard anyone in this street complain about it except in relation to number 14.

On number 14

His name is Douglas. He is about seventy. He has lived here longer than I have, which he mentions.

In four years he has put out the correct bin, by my count, forty-one times out of two hundred and eight.

Forty-one. That is worse than chance. I did check. A man putting out a bin at random would be right about half the time and Douglas is right nineteen per cent of the time, which is a result so bad it constitutes a kind of achievement.

On the escalation

04/2022 — Spoke to D. He was pleasant. Said he'd "have a look at the calendar." Green bin out following week.

09/2022 — Left a printed calendar in his letterbox. Highlighted. He thanked me over the fence. Green bin out following week.

02/2023 — Bought him a magnet. GAVE HIM A MAGNET.

03/2023 — Green bin.

On the theory

In autumn 2023 I formed the view that it was deliberate.

I no longer hold this view, but I held it strongly for about seven months, and during that period I did some things I am not going to itemise.

What changed my mind was that in November 2023 Douglas put out the green bin on grey week and then, at about eight in the evening, came out and stood looking at it for some time, and then went in, and did not move it.

A man doing it deliberately would move it. That is the entire point of doing it deliberately.

On what it actually is

In March I found out.

His daughter was over — she comes about twice a year, from Dundee — and she was putting out the grey bin, correctly, and she said, without my asking, in the tone of someone continuing a conversation she'd had a hundred times: "He can't tell them apart. He won't say. It's the green and the grey."

I said nothing at all, which took some doing.

She said her father had been colour-blind his whole life and had never once used the word about himself, and that he had managed forty-one years as a bus driver and thirty-two years of marriage and two children and had got to seventy without ever conceding the point, and that a bin was not going to be the thing.

On the current arrangement

I put my bin out on Tuesday evening now, rather than Wednesday morning.

Douglas puts his out after mine.

I have not mentioned it. He has not mentioned it. We have never discussed it and we are never going to.

Correct bin, one hundred and eleven weeks running.

On the log

I have kept it up. It seems a shame to stop.

04/06/25 — Grey. Correct.
11/06/25 — Green. Correct.
18/06/25 — Grey. Correct.