People are strange. And dirty.

Coming downstairs from my flat last week, I was greeted with this.

Somebody had - seemingly deliberately - kicked the paper bin in. What annoyed me more is that numerous people from the building had managed to step over the detritus without it particularly worrying them. I decided to clean it up.

Generally only destined for paper, people use the bin for everything, and the cleaner for the building hadn't cleaned inside it for quite a while. As in 'years'. This is what I saw when I opened it up:

Rotting biscuit crumbs from the 20th Century, chocolate, Spiderman arms, a large collection of used tissues. It was pretty gross. I cleaned up what I could (much of it was securely stuck to the bottom) and sent an e-mail to the company that looks after the building to say that it was no wonder that we had cockroaches for years.

I'm constantly amazed at how disrespectful and dirty some people can be. The next day, someone had put their bin bag in there because they couldn't be bothered to go into the courtyard (5 metres away) and use the big bin. So what should you do? Get riled up? Pointless, frustrating, a waste of energy. Leave a note? Passive aggressive, generally ineffective. Hmm... not quite sure. Suppose it's just part of living in the city...