City Councils Are Rubbish!

This week’s post about ridiculous things will be exploring the lack of logic you can expect to encounter from your average city council, especially when it comes to your rubbish. Are city councils rubbish? If so, this could be something that applies to any council. But in my case, the award for pointless acts of idiocy goes to York City Council.

 In a street that has ample back yards for rubbish to be stored in until the garbage truck appears to pick it up, York City Council have decided that the rubbish should be left outside people’s front doors because the garbage men are too fragile to open a gate. Perhaps–like Tinker Bell–they are just too small to deal with such a giant structure.

On top of that, they’ve come up with a way to make money from it too. If you put your rubbish out at any time other than between 7pm and 7am on rubbish collection day, then you will be fined up to £1000.00. Well, they have to create a fund for those funeral wreaths they call Christmas decorations, right?

To ensure I’ve got this right, let me just go over this again. I’m expected to drag my stinky rubbish bags from my back garden and through my house, thus leaving a trail of slugs behind on the floor, along with whatever other alien shit has grown in there during the week

And to make it worse, I have to do this at night, the night before the fragile rubbish men–who can’t open gates–will appear to take it away. On top of that, I have to leave it outside my front door, so when I dash out to work early in the morning, I can be guaranteed to fall arse over tit into week-old garbage.

Oh wait, it gets better. On top of that, we’re given tiny little tubs to fit our recycling into each fortnight. Since most people eat more than one meal a fortnight, you end up becoming the master of packing as much into them as you possibly can.

If–god forbid–you have more recycling than you can fit in the tub, you can put it in a plastic bag for the rubbish men. But, they won’t take white bags that are clearly marked with ‘plastic recycling’. Nooo, it has to be in a carrier bag, or they refuse to take it. Why? Who knows. A clearly marked white bag, neatly organised for them is not good enough. They much prefer an skanky old Tesco carrier bag because nothing says recycling like a Tesco’s carrier bag, right? o.O

I better start stocking up on carrier bags since our recycling tubs are more likely to be stolen than emptied from outside our house anyway. No really, someone stole a shitty plastic tub from outside my mother’s house. Perhaps they needed a trinket box? Anyway, a big congratulations to them for stealing from an elderly lady who had cancer. You really made her day, and of course I’m not going to gut you like a fish and put your entrails in a small plastic tub for it, honest.

Anyway, with all these new innovations in refuse collection, I have to wonder if these new systems are an improvement on the old ones, where the bin men used to come and take my rubbish away without any problems at all.

When it comes to the most ridiculous way to deal with rubbish, I think the fine people at York City Council deserve some applause. Well done in making something very simple into a complicated weekly event that involves fighting alien-like slugs, creating an apocalyptic-world of garbage-filled streets, and making our lives a living hell.