Friday, February 10, 2006

Vanishing dustbins

For eight years, we've had two black plastic dustbins. They're old - one of them had quite a crack in the bottom - and fairly grubby, but they did their job. Every couple of days I emptied our inside bins into a black sack and put it outside in a dustbin. The dustmen come early in the mornings on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (excellent service!) and empty them.

They were definitely here a week ago when I took a load of quick photos around the house and outside to put on a CD for Daniel.


See... right by the front of the car, in this little piece of one of the pictures of our front garden. (Uh, full of weeds... but the geranium is doing well). In fact, they were there Wednesday night when I put a sack of rubbish out.

But this morning, when we were getting in the car to do our weekly supermarket visit, Richard noticed that they had vanished.

It was quite a windy night, so we thought perhaps they had blown out into the street. But no, we couldn't see them anywhere. So maybe the dustmen had put them in our neighbour's front yard? Nope - no sign. Could they have been stolen?? Um... Theft is pretty rare in Cyprus anyway, but who on EARTH would steal two rather ancient, extremely tatty, partly broken dustbins?

So maybe they were so bad that the dustmen decided to throw them away along with the rubbish. I don't suppose we'll ever know.

Since we hope to be moving soon, we'll just put out the black sacks for now, rather than going to the trouble of buying a new dustbin. I don't even know where they can be bought from.

But it's very odd.

1 comment:

Steve Hayes said...

Some years ago, when our daughter Bridget was about to go off to study in Greece, she looked out of the window and saw a man making off with our dustbin. It was one of those wheelie bins.

She got up, got dressed, and went up the street, but he, and the bin, had vanished. A woman in a car at a corner up the road said she had seen him take it into the vacan't land next to the railway line, but there was no sign of him or the bin.

So we photocopied notes and put them in the neighbours' letter boxes, asking if anyone had seen the rubbish bin thief. No response.

Then a few days later Bridget saw the man (he had a distinctive hat) up by the railway line, and while her brother called the police, she went and took photos of him with a telephoto lens -- real "secret seven" stuff. The police came and arrested him. It turned out he had been stealing ballast from the railway line and taking it back to his father's house, where his father used it to mix concrete.