Rogue Hero of our Building

Living in a condo, one of the conveniences is being able to take your trash out whenever you want and tossing it down the trash chute.

The rule of the building is, if you have large items that don't fit down the chute, you are allowed to leave it in the chute room. If these items happen to be recyclable, they will not get recycled. Although we do have a large recycling/trash room downstairs, many people get lazy and just don't recycle their large boxes.

I don't know if this happens just on our floor, but we also have some lazy (or germ-phobic) person(s) who enjoy(s) leaving their garbage bags in the trash chute room, rather than tossing it down the chute. This makes the room smell pretty badly, needless to say. So after a couple of these incidences, we saw a hand-written sign taped next to the chute by a fellow resident that asked, not very politely, for the person who does it to stop.

When I saw it, I giggled uncontrollably: "So I'm not the only person who gets annoyed, eh!" I tell Adam. Unfortunately, that sign did not scare anyone except for the building management, who replaced the sign with an official notice that stated what belongs down the chute, what belongs in the room, and what does not belong in the room. Nevertheless, the disrespect for rules (or illiterateness) continued.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was happily (or miserably, you decide) sitting in front of the computer doing my work, I heard a lot of commotion outside of our door that, I thought at the time, could have been from our neighbours across the aisle, but was a little too close to our door for me to feel safe. I chose to ignore it, like all normal (or abnormal) people.

At around 6pm, Adam opens our door from the outside and shows me a sheet of shipping paper taped to our door, addressed to Jessica Something or another, apartment XXX, with a handwritten scribble on the sheet saying something like, "Stop leaving your garbage in the room or management will come get you." Another apartment number XYZ was scribbled across the sheet.

Beneath this taped note, was a pile of garbage (thankfully nothing gross, just a large biodegradable packaging paper and some torn up large boxes.) Oh, so that was what that commotion was...

Hmmm...here's some of my observations and theories:

• My name is not Jessica something something, and we don't live in aparment XXX (we live in apartment XXY, right across from XXX). So this rogue law enforcer must have been illiterate like the person(s) doing the littering...
• OR, she/he might have some of form of spatial dyslexia
• The hand written XYZ on top of the sheet makes me suspect that perhaps the original person who did this put it at the wrong door, but the litterer wrote a different number...
• ...You know...I can't explain why there was another apartment number scribbled on the sheet at all....doesn't make any logical sense.
• Technically, that pile of garbage does belong in the trash chute room, since it's oversized, so it does prove to me that rogue law enforcer is illiterate.
• ...But to be fair, we live in a pretty yuppie condo, so the chances of people being illiterate is pretty low...I really have no explanations

Anyway, Adam and I stared at this mess for a bit, then we decided to gently nudge the garbage across the hallway and place the note on the door of apartment number on the shipping sheet (not the scribbled over one, since that one was too far down the hall). Five minutes later, I decided that I wanted to take a picture of the pile, but it was already gone...

In the evening, each unit of our floor got a notice from the building manager asking the rogue officer to please stop taking the matter into his or her own hands based on his or her own suspicion...

All I can say is that I am sorry I didn't open the door during the commotion and took a look at our illiterate rogue hero.



Oh, and Adam thinks our rogue hero is a girl because only girls would do passive-aggressive things like that. But I think it has to be a man, cuz it's pretty juvenile and all girls can read.