Would you believe it! Our bin has been stolen!
Instead of a garden, we have a sort of bin-park at the front of the house. With lots of different coloured bins for throwing away different sorts of rubbish.
Two of them are grey – and those are the containers where you chuck anything that can’t be put in the other bins (so anything that isn’t packaging, garden waste, glass, paper, batteries or whatever….)
Well one of ours has been stolen. It’s gone, vanished, disparu! Pooof!
Without it, our household waste was too much for the remaining bin. So we had to go down to the local council office to buy one of their official big bin bags for € 2.50 and report our bin missing.
We were sent upstairs to the ominous sounding “Zimmer 19” where the Rubbish-Beamtinnen sit at their computers… presumably controlling the movement of refuse around Meerbusch.
One of them looked us up in her computer.
“So you have a 120 litre and an 80 litre grey bin,” she said.
“It’s the 80 litre one that’s gone missing.”
“I will put out an alert to the bin-collectors. They will search the whole of Meerbusch for it. If they don’t find it within three weeks, we will send you a new one.”
She typed something furiously into her computer – presumably an order for a highly trained squad of bin-theft detectives to go screeching onto the streets in their bin-lorries with blue flashing lights.
Anyway – just on the off-chance that the criminal gang who stole our bin hasn’t already melted it down into plastic ingots and smuggled it over the border to Poland or Russia… here’s a photo-fit impression of the missing bin. Distinguishing marks include a rather grubby lid and some festering cat litter inside….
4 Comments
February 15, 2008 at 7:14 pm
After finishing Planet Germany I was hoping for more, and here you are!
I must hear more about German mothers in law and omas and opas. Since my mother in law bears an uncanny resemblence to your description in the book I am now convinced it must be genetic because she’s at least the 2nd or 3rd generation removed from Germany. I’ve had to ban her from my house.
February 15, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Hahahaha. Only in Germany would there be a woman behind a desk taking a problem like this very very seriously. I love it.
February 25, 2008 at 10:23 am
Some cities “Chip” there bins with RFID..
The serial #’s are entered into the city garbage bin DB and are assigned to an address. The Tags are read
by the trucks and can record how much you throw out by the weight of the bin when the bin lift picks it up.
This is how they can also track you if you put the wrong items in the wrong bin, then you get a nasty letter from the city.
March 3, 2008 at 11:47 am
Haha, that’s too funny. I’ve moved from Bavaria to South-East England last year, and our wheelie bin went missing three weeks ago.
I was convinced such a thing would happen in Britain only