I have to rant a little this morning. I apologize in advance.

One of the things that gets under my skin the most is lack-of-consideration of fellow humans - people doing junk that makes someone else's life harder just because they think that junk's funny, or because they're bored, or something.

Trash pick-up day in my neighborhood is Monday. Most of my neighbors and I put our polycarts out Sunday night because the time of pickup can be a bit unpredictable (usually it's around noon but I've heard the trucks as early as 6:30 am).

I was a bit apprehensive putting mine out last night because we were supposed to get high wind and I was concerned about the cart blowing over, but I finally decided that it was unlikely enough (given how bottom-heavy they are when they have trash bags in them, and mine was fuller than usual because Saturday I did my every-couple-months walk-through-the-neighborhood-and-pick-up-litter deals).

Well, going out this morning, I saw that the lid was flipped open. It has been raining quite heavily all night - we got perhaps 2" of rain. At first, I thought, "Odd that the wind could do that" (given the lid configuration). Then I realized that ALL the polycarts up and down my street - on both sides - had the lids flipped open.

I flipped the lid of mine closed (in the cold rain) and grumbled a little, and had just about decided that it was really unlikely someone went out in the rain and the storms JUST to flip all the lids open to be a jerk, when I was driving down the street and saw that further up in the neighborhood, the polycarts were UPENDED. Not blown over - turned upside down and the lid opened so that no matter what you do to try to pick it up, trash will go everywhere. And there were some mailboxes pulled up by their posts.

People infuriate me sometimes. Is that REALLY so fun, going out on a wild rainy night, messing with people's trash? The trash collectors in this town DO NOT GET PAID ENOUGH to have to deal with a streetful of polycarts of wet trash (and I wouldn't blame them if they refused to pick up my street this week). Granted, all the trash is supposed to be in tied-up bags (and mine is), but still - wet bags of trash is no fun.

And even worse - the upendings. As I said, no matter how a person tried to fix it, they'd wind up getting covered in wet trash.

And of course, this will totally undo my cleanup of Saturday, because the trash that doesn't get gathered back up will just blow around.

I think if they catch people doing this? They should assign them something like 500 hours of community service picking up trash and doing other kinds of icky, not-fun jobs. Or maybe even: make them pick up trash, put it in a bin, and then have the supervisor turn the bin over and say, "Now do it again. Because this is what you did to the people."

I try to be forgiving of people when they do wrong, but it's really hard when the "wrong" is so unnecessary - if you have that kind of free time, there are hundreds of non-destructive things that you could do. Especially on a rainy night.