I did not take it anymore.

Last week when I had to take out a million bags of garbage because my husband is lazy and not at all helpful, I encountered a staircase full of disgusting things. It would seem that someone in our building took out some garbage but instead of putting it INTO the dumpster, they left it BESIDE the dumpster. Gross enough, but at some point someone or something decided to tear the bag open and dump all the contents out around the dumpster. There were empty food containers, honest to god banana peels on the steps leading to the garbage bins, personal information, and other horrible things strewn about all willy-nilly. The worst part wasn’t even the garbage – it was the fact that it had been there since I last went out to check on Oscar; the previous Sunday. It was rotting and smelly and hazardous as fuck, so I did what any outraged citizen with too much time on their hands would do: I took pictures, printed them out, and put them in the lobby on the notice board with a note.

You can look at the garbage here, if you want. I didn’t want to have the images show up in my Flickr stream, so I put them somewhere else. I also had to edit the photos a little, because right on top of the mess was a piece of paper containing the phone number, address and buzzer number of where the garbage came from. Any guesses as to whom the culprits likely were? I’ll give you a hint: they live upstairs, and they’re idiots. We left the information clearly visible in the photos in the lobby because I am a bastard (although not as much of a bastard as Ed and Josh would like – they wanted me to zoom in on the address and post it on the board along with the garbage, but I’m doing the whole “benefit of the doubt” thing).

At any rate, my Exercise in Humiliation seems to have done the trick. When we came home from Victoria, my signs in the lobby were gone. Ed went out back to check, and sure enough, the garbage was cleaned up. Whether the guilty party actually did the work or the apartment manager gave up and did it himself (which brings to mind the question of “why wasn’t it cleaned up the day it happened instead of at least a week later and after the tenants started getting mad”), I don’t know. I don’t really care. The garbage is gone, I got my justice freak on, and maybe now that it’s known there’s a Pajama’d Crusader in the building with an excellent camera and colour printer and a taste for public humiliation, stuff like this won’t happen again.

Speaking of rapidly changing the subject, I uploaded pictures from our trip to Victoria. Josh and Shan lent me their Holga Fisheye Lens (dear Santa: please bring me one for my very own), so most of the pictures are fisheye’d and funky. As an added bonus, there are pictures of a couple making out! Hooray!