The dustbinmen who collect the black rubbish bags from the front of our house aren’t, bless ‘em, the brightest of God’s creatures. You wouldn’t expect them to be. It’s obviously a job where brawn is more important than brains, and they’re normally a cheerful lot.
But their lack of mental acuity occasionally leads to unpleasantness. (The same phenomenon was observable when John Prescott was in power.)
Our road has a sharp bend in it, which makes it awkward for trucks to get round easily: in fact many are forced to back up and take another route.
The lorry the council provides for collecting black bags is too big for our road, if all the parking spaces are full (which they invariably are on a Monday morning). Up to eighteen months ago, the dustbinmen used to go through a tedious weekly pantomime. When their lorry got stuck, one of them would honk their horn for five minutes while the other two would ring every doorbell in sight, hunting down the owner of the car that was blocking their passage (if only!). As it’s impossible to tell in advance which car will cause a problem – they approach the bend from a variety of angles (their driving skills appear to be limited) – I have had to move my car on several occasions, with, believe it or not, good grace.
Then, one day, they decided to get tough.
After I’d moved my car, they still couldn’t get through – yet another car needed to be shifted, and the owner evidently didn’t want to get out of bed at 8.30 in the morning. Fair enough: as their car was legally parked, that was up to them. When she finally did appear – the problem had been solved - she was subjected to a volley of profane abuse from the largest of the refuse collection team, an Ulsterman (No Surrender!).
I told him not to be so rude to what were, in effect, his employers. He countered that he could have all of our cars towed away and have us prosecuted for delaying them. And that if we kept parking in our legally-sanctioned parking bays, the council would make us leave our rubbish at the end of the road rather than in front of our houses.
I made some obvious points in reply.
First, that if they turned up an hour later, most of the cars would be gone, and they’d have a better chance of getting through. Second, that a Conservative council probably wouldn’t sanction towing away cars whose owners had paid a fee – to the council – for the right to park where they were parked. Third, that it wasn’t our job to be on call to help out council employees – council employees were paid to serve rate-payers, not the other way round. Fourth, shouting obscenities at your employer – even in modern Britain – wasn’t really the done thing, and we residents were his employers. Fifth, that we paid the council a lot of money to collect our rubbish from the front of our house on a weekly basis – but how they did it was entirely up to them, as long as it didn’t unduly inconvenience us. Finally, I told him that we were getting bored by his loutish behaviour and suggested he take the matter up with his bosses – or I certainly would.
This was all received as enthusiastically as you might expect, and I fully expected the entrance to our house to be strewn with litter the following week. But it wasn’t. Instead, they stopped trying to get the lorry round the impossible bend and simply backed it up to the main road, zipped round the corner, and repeated the manoeuvre in the second half of the street.
This morning, though, they decided to return to the old ways that had served them so well in the past. There were several minutes of horn-honking. When I looked out of the window, dustbinmen were stomping up and down the road, ready to pounce on anyone opening their door - which, unsurprisingly, no one was doing. All the cars were legally parked. “Is this your car?” one of them mouthed at me through the window. I mouthed a suitably unhelpful reply before returning to my cornflakes.
Even allowing for stupidity, what had got into them?
Chelsea fans, maddened by their team’s defeat by Spurs at the weekend? Conservative supporters upset by the surge in support for Nick Clegg following last week’s leaders’ debate? Had their holiday plans been disrupted by the ridiculous European no-fly zone?
God knows. But when faced with such bovine idiocy, such a commitment to being outraged and thwarted, such relish for a pointless, unwinnable battle, such a fierce longing for victimhood, one begins to understand the nature of conflict in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and a host of other hot-spots.
Being a genuine victim must be horrible. But being a pretend victim is fun, because there’s no genuine suffering involved, you can bask in an intoxicating bath of self-pity, and you give yourself a perfect excuse to behave badly. I’ve been there. We all have.
Let’s hope the cruelly thwarted horn-honker’s football team wins next weekend, so we can all enjoy a pleasant start to the week.
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