Leaflet shit

I don’t really read the things that I should: from ‘best before’ labels on dairy products, to letters from the council. I see them, but because they’re not immediately important to me, because they don’t have an immediate impact on my life, because I’m happy enough in my own world - then in my mind, there’s no point concerning my already overworked head with them.

I once answered a knock on the door to be greeted by a man identifying himself as a bailiff. Apparently I hadn’t paid my council tax and he was there to duff me up/sell my functioning internal organs/do whatever it is that bailiffs do.

After paying him, I contacted the council to find out why they hadn’t told me about this. To which I was informed very politely that they had infact sent me lots of letters about it.

“Don’t be so ridiculous” was my response “I’m not an idiot, if I had received them I would obviously have opened something so important and read....ahhhh”

I stopped as I remembered the pile of stuff that I don’t read, hidden away under the coffee table. In that pile I discovered about 10 letters from the council, each getting progressively more insistent, culminating in a letter that essentially ended with a ‘bollocks to you then, see you in court dickhead’ crescendo.

A court appearance that I didn’t attend, because I hadn’t seen the letter telling me to, because it was under the coffee table.

Anyway, one of the other items that I don’t read are Wheelie Bin collection leaflets. It’s far easier for me to peer out of the window on a Monday evening and see what colour bin the people on the street have put out, than it ever will be reading the leaflet and keeping it in a safe place, and then remembering where that safe place is. That sounds like someone elses hell.

Except, over the Christmas period it all gets a bit confused because the day changes from Tuesday to another day, which I will have been informed about in the leaflet, that is somewhere under the coffee table, that I haven’t read.

On Tuesday this week my bin had become so full that I thought that it was better to just stick it out the front of the house, to be sure that I wouldn’t miss the collection day, whenever it was. I had no clue when collection day was, I just knew that I didn’t want to miss it when it was.

10 minutes later, the rest of the street had all wheeled their bins out. The same colour as mine. I imagined that everyone else on the street was thinking how organised I was for knowing when the collection day was. This satisfied me.

Except that no collection lorry turned up the next day. I saw people on the street walk up to their bins, open them up, look confused that it hadn’t been emptied, walk up to someone elses bin, open that up and see that it hadn’t been emptied either. The look on their face then was an ‘I’m really, really confused now/thank God its not just my bin’ hybrid.

You know that look. Yeah you do.

What I’d actually achieved made me very proud. Not only had I’d started my own false Wheelie Bin chain, but I'd exposed everyone else for being as leaflet shit as I was.