MYOB (part 2)
February 11th 2010 21:00
Photo by Nachoman-au. Used in accordance with the terms of Wikimedia Commons’ GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
There’s another busybody. She lives right next door to me and is the caretaker for the same building. She is also a very rude person, unlike the caretakers my sister and I know – namely, Fred, Chris and Jason.
I had the misfortune of crossing paths with her one morning. It was 7.30am and the recycling bins were due to be emptied by the council garbos within the next half an hour. I had three newspapers and some empty plastic trays. I went to use my bins but someone had placed several large cardboard boxes over them. I then decided to use next door’s bins, never dreaming it could lead to one of the angriest episodes of my life.
I put the plastic trays in the plastic recycling bin and was about to put the newspapers in the paper one when (again) an old woman came up to me and said, “Excuse me. You don’t live here. You should not be using these bins.”
I said something like, “What difference does it make? The garbos are going to be here to empty them in half an hour.” I was dumbfounded; when I lived at the building across the road, we didn’t even have our own bins so we used our neighbours’. No one ever complained and the body corporate was happy because that was one less thing they needed to worry about.
The woman then started shouting at me, telling me to use the bins across the road. I backed away; I could not believe someone could get so aggressive over something so petty, so quickly. I also noticed how hypocritical she was. I heard her shouting something about her bins were full enough as it was without outsiders like me adding to the pile.
At first, I tried to be the bigger person. I bit my tongue. I could hear my psychologist friend’s voice saying, “There are two ways to talk to someone. You can be rude or you can be polite.” I then saw the woman walk off. That was when anger took over and I lost it. I screamed at her, at the top of my lungs, “GET A LIFE YOU F*CKEN C*NT. YOU NEED TO GET LAID!” After putting the newspapers in the bin, I noticed I still had a small plastic item in my hand. I put it in her bin and slammed the lid for good measure.
I arrived at work, livid and ashamed. Even looking at photos of Butterscotch did nothing to calm me down. I normally don’t use such foul language except when I’m with Fred. Even the very liberal and cosmopolitan Brett objects to the C word. “Your language is a bit rich,” is what he says. That said, I called Fred and told him what happened. Fred told me my reaction was perfectly understandable and, in fact, there been a similar incident that happened at one of the buildings he looks after. Chuckling, he told me an old nosey parker had said something that upset one of the other tenants. The next time the tenant ran into her, he screamed at her, “YOU NEED A F*CK YOU UGLY OLD BAG” or something to that effect.
When I told my psychologist friend, he said my anger was perfectly justifiable given the pettiness of the situation. He also added that verbally abusing her wasn’t the best way of dealing with the situation: “She could have come back and hit you. You never know what people are capable of.”
My other friends now refer to the woman as the bin screamer or the trash bin lady. My colleague also knows the whole story. If I arrive at work on a Wednesday and say to him, “Guess who I saw?” he will fire back with, “The bin screamer!” I now try to leave the house before 7.30am on recycling day to avoid running into her. Whenever I see her she has a filthy look on her face. I don’t know whether it’s because she’s an unhappy person to begin with or because she remembers our sparring match, or both. “Don’t worry about her,” says my best friend Andrea. “She must aggravate a lot of people and she probably has people screaming back at her all the time.”
One of my neighbours, who also happens to be another old lady, likes to get her daily paper from other people’s recycling bins instead of buying her own copy. I told her about the bin screamer the next time I bumped into her.
“Thanks for the warning,” she said. “I actually go through those bins for my paper.”
“I know,” I said. “I wanted to tell you as I don’t want her screaming at you so be careful.”
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