That Could Have Given The Rubbish Collectors A Good Giggle.

Mixing up the schedule...again.

Now I am rather sorry that I mentioned it to Bob.

Burgenland has a very cutting edge way to collect the discards of life, ie. the rubbish. Not to put ourselves down, but it took Bob and me a few months to get it right. We came from a country where each and every day, anything our hearts desired to be tossed out, could be put in one bin and be collected. Easy peasy.

Not so here and I am very proud of this. Oh, we recycle, separate and even take the heavy old things ( not me ) to the dump once a month. For those of you not in the know, here is how we do the rubbish:

• Anything plastic goes into the yellow rubbish bag ( packaging / yoghurt cups / milk containers etc )
• Anything paper goes into the red lidded rubbish bin.
• Glass gets taken to the local glass recycling container...quite a lot of winebottles in our household! Best done in cover of darkness to hide from prying eyes...
• Cans get taken to the same place but different bin.
• Anything else that you can not sort in the above, gets put into a general rubbish bin. The bin with a black lid.

Seems simple enough, but often the packaging is blatantly multi-rubbish. Anyway, we are good at it now. But, and that is a big but, each of the three rubbish-lines ( ie: yellow bags, red-lidded bin and black lidded bin ) only gets collected every 4-6 weeks. Oh yes. Fun and smells in a hot summer!

We get sent a yearly schedule of the various collection dates and Bob puts it religiously into our calander. The rubbish schedule is his baby. The odd times that I question his schedule, he gets a bit miffed and does his usual:

" If you don't like the way I do it, do it yourself.'

. You can imagine that I keep any complaints to a minimum, as I don't like to do this particular chore.

Monday was looked forward to by us because it meant Yellow Bag Collection in our village. We were proud that we both remembered to put out the yellow bags. About three of them on our curb. Bob was extremely chuffed that he remembered to put them out before 7 o'clock.

Fast forward to 8 o'clock and there I was walking through our village. As I was striding along, I noticed something strange. Why were there only red lidded rubbish bins on all the curbs? Oooh, ooops Monday was paper day and not plastic day.

For some lucky reason I had a cell phone along with me, and kindly phoned the chief rubbish man. As the roaring of the big rubbish truck was imminent I merely uttered one sentence:

" Bob, it's paper bins today."

Imagine the chuckle the rubbish men would have had seeing the yellow roses among the sea of red bins? They might have cut us some slack and given us a hoot. I bet they have a tick next to our house number because twice Bob has been known to run after them with a bin in tow...

Biggi