Chris and I live in a large, fairly new apartment building that’s remarkably nice compared to the last place we lived. The hallway carpet is meticulously vacuumed, the doors freshly painted, and the lobby’s fairly ugly hotel-style decor is always gleaming. And yet there’s one glaring exception to all this prim tidiness: the trash room on our floor is a little patch of hell. This is the small closety nook that houses the garbage chute and a couple of big recycling bins, and just outside it is where large or bulky objects are supposed to be left for disposal. But I think there’s something about the anonymity of this procedure that brings out the inner asshole in any given resident as effectively as an unmoderated messageboard.

Even though there’s no real excuse for leaving anything outside the trash room except furniture and large boxes, every time I walk by there’s a heap of random crap that people couldn’t be bothered to bag up and toss down the garbage chute. The one that’s right there. This morning it was a plastic chinese takeout bag, two empty coffee cups, a cardboard paper towel tube, and a Barney’s bag filled with junk mail. This is all just sitting on the carpet outside the trash room itself. Inside the room, there’s once again a pile of miscellaneous shit dumped into what are supposed to be recycling bins, even though the trash chute is at this point less than six inches away. Today in the glass bin it was old clothes, half-full Dean & Deluca takeout containers, and three dirty plates. Maybe I should start leaving passive aggressive notes.