Evil old ladies

As I was taking the rubbish out today, I had a sudden flashback to a few years ago when I was living in a small apartment complex with individual rubbish bins. Some apartment complexes have a small number of large communal bins, but this place had one bin per apartment, and there was no manager or handyman who was paid to take them out each week.

Being the nice guy that I am, I found myself taking all the bins out around 3 weeks in 4. I only missed a bin night if I was away on a business trip or whatever. It was no big deal - they were small bins and they only had to be carried about 20 feet from the bin area to the verge.

The thing that drove me nuts though was that the enviro-nazi council only allowed very small bins. The bins were would be sufficient for a little old lady living on her own that living on cat food and oranges, but not a couple of people that had dinner parties every single week. Everytime I took the bins out, I'd be weighing them to find those with enough room to jam a bag or two of my rubbish into them. My altruistic bin moving was not entirely without purpose.

Anyway, there lived a little old lady on the top floor that wasn't there half the time, and most weeks her bin would have one small bag of rubbish in it. I never inspected it, so I can't tell you whether it contained Whiskers tins and orange peel, but it was the perfect receptacle for my dinner party overflows.

Only one problem. The old duck was ferociously protective of her bin. She never thanked me for taking it out and bringing it back in - she just left scathing notes on all the apartment doors if anyone dared to put some of their rubbish in her bin. I even tried taking the bins out late at night - like midnight - and sneaking rubbish into her bin whilst I was in a blind spot where she couldn't see me from her windows - and I was always sure she was sitting there at the window on rubbish night trying to detect who was putting stuff in her bin. It didn't matter. She always knew. And the wierd thing is that all the bins looked the same, and they had small numbers on the side, so it was pretty much impossible to tell from the top floor what bin the rubbish was going into.

Unless she was using binoculars.

Some time later, I met one of her daughters - who was about 60. She told me that her Mum went off to visit a friend several times a week, drank a bottle of sherry and drove home (in an old Datsun) completely shickered. I guess that's why oldies drive so slowly - it's not their eyesight - it's the bottle of extra dry sherry.

The problem is, she never got on the turps on bin night.

Old ladies can be evil.