The Bin Day Code
by Tom Greenwood
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: The hand of God again?
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There is something to be said for having lots of time on your hand, not needing a job and having, yes I am aware of them, slight mental health issues of the compulsive sort. The thing is, once you get the idea in your head to do something no matter how absurd it is then really there’s no stopping you. You just sort of can’t.
My latest obsession was with Bin Day.
Where I live we get our bins emptied on a Monday, weekly, but what about elsewhere? Are there weekend emptyings? Do certain days predominate? This sort of thing needed research. And I decided I was the person to do it.
I should point out, for the purposes of this exercise I treated fortnightly liftings as weekly. I took note of them for subsequent analysis you realise but fortnightly emptyings on a Monday are just Mondays.
Now even with the wondrous interweb in all of its glorious pages, there is not a lot of information on which postcodes get their bins emptied on which day. For that sort of information you have to write to the councils directly.
Dear Sir I am a Post-graduate student studying recycling blah-de-blah-de-blah, you get the drift.
So wait a few weeks and the replies start coming in from the councils. A wealth of information, not just on bin days but on glass recycling days, biodegradables and so on. Lots of information to catalogue and cross-reference. Then with a large blank map of Great Britain, printed from the internet, on several pieces of A4, I start colouring in the areas according to bin-day, making sure I got all those tiny little areas in just the right place. Yes I know I missed out Northern Ireland, but because it shares the island of Ireland with the Republic, I was saving that for future research.
So blue for Monday, green for Tuesday, yellow for Wednesday was a bit faint, so I made it orange, purple for Thursday and red for Friday. Well I thought I could be in line for the Turner Prize, I think that’s what it’s called; you know that arty-farty art prize for painting with elephant dung or dead cows. My work could show our obsession with recycling or how artwork can be created out of raw information. You can make up any justification for any piece of piss and sometimes the entries are piss. I wonder if anyone has done that? Entered some piss because all the entries are piss. They ignored my previous artwork by the way, my origami jungle. It took me months to finish that.
I’m off the subject, aren’t I, so I was about halfway through it when I started to notice a pattern. The annoying thing was the councils in the North of England were a bit slow to reply. Scotland and South of England, they were on the ball, but North of England, weeks behind. Eventually though, enough of them had managed to reply. I’ll bet you’re glad to know that your rates are being spent on such useful things as to replying to pretend recycling students. Not the recycling of students but students of recycling just so you’re sure about that. I’m going off the subject again, aren’t I?
Anyway once I had finished, and I had to deliberately not look until I was finished, you can do that if you’re obsessive, most people can’t, but I can. Anyway once I was finished I put the map sideways on the wall, the only way it would fit. Only the colours weren’t random, what had appeared on my map was a message. Written across my wall was the multi-hued message ‘God woz ’ere’.
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: The hand of God again?
_____________________________________________________________________
There is something to be said for having lots of time on your hand, not needing a job and having, yes I am aware of them, slight mental health issues of the compulsive sort. The thing is, once you get the idea in your head to do something no matter how absurd it is then really there’s no stopping you. You just sort of can’t.
My latest obsession was with Bin Day.
Where I live we get our bins emptied on a Monday, weekly, but what about elsewhere? Are there weekend emptyings? Do certain days predominate? This sort of thing needed research. And I decided I was the person to do it.
I should point out, for the purposes of this exercise I treated fortnightly liftings as weekly. I took note of them for subsequent analysis you realise but fortnightly emptyings on a Monday are just Mondays.
Now even with the wondrous interweb in all of its glorious pages, there is not a lot of information on which postcodes get their bins emptied on which day. For that sort of information you have to write to the councils directly.
Dear Sir I am a Post-graduate student studying recycling blah-de-blah-de-blah, you get the drift.
So wait a few weeks and the replies start coming in from the councils. A wealth of information, not just on bin days but on glass recycling days, biodegradables and so on. Lots of information to catalogue and cross-reference. Then with a large blank map of Great Britain, printed from the internet, on several pieces of A4, I start colouring in the areas according to bin-day, making sure I got all those tiny little areas in just the right place. Yes I know I missed out Northern Ireland, but because it shares the island of Ireland with the Republic, I was saving that for future research.
So blue for Monday, green for Tuesday, yellow for Wednesday was a bit faint, so I made it orange, purple for Thursday and red for Friday. Well I thought I could be in line for the Turner Prize, I think that’s what it’s called; you know that arty-farty art prize for painting with elephant dung or dead cows. My work could show our obsession with recycling or how artwork can be created out of raw information. You can make up any justification for any piece of piss and sometimes the entries are piss. I wonder if anyone has done that? Entered some piss because all the entries are piss. They ignored my previous artwork by the way, my origami jungle. It took me months to finish that.
I’m off the subject, aren’t I, so I was about halfway through it when I started to notice a pattern. The annoying thing was the councils in the North of England were a bit slow to reply. Scotland and South of England, they were on the ball, but North of England, weeks behind. Eventually though, enough of them had managed to reply. I’ll bet you’re glad to know that your rates are being spent on such useful things as to replying to pretend recycling students. Not the recycling of students but students of recycling just so you’re sure about that. I’m going off the subject again, aren’t I?
Anyway once I had finished, and I had to deliberately not look until I was finished, you can do that if you’re obsessive, most people can’t, but I can. Anyway once I was finished I put the map sideways on the wall, the only way it would fit. Only the colours weren’t random, what had appeared on my map was a message. Written across my wall was the multi-hued message ‘God woz ’ere’.
About the Author
Tom Greenwood was born in Bishopbriggs and now lives in Edinburgh with his wife, two daughters and a rabbit. You can find out more about the Beesidian Republic in his novel, to be published soon by Night Publishing.