Cul-de-Sac de Dump

The folks at the dump hate my guts. That's okay, I'm used to it. I don't care one way or the other about them and I think this shines through my fragile, porcelain exterior. 
They, like so many before them, sense my absence of a.) loyalty to their tenets, and b.) deep respect for the importance of their line of work.

While a.) is true, b.) is not necessarily true. It is a nuanced respect. Nuance is difficult to get across in the brief episodes which find us, the dump workers and me, at loggerheads.

Now normally, in a sane town, the folks at the dump, like, the workers, would hide in a low shed, sweating, eating corn chips and watching soccer games - diverted only every whistle-blow by online gambling. But our town has no budget for such a low shed. Indeed not even for the corn chips. So the dump workers are forced to either stand guard at the cul-de-sac of sorting bins or else hide in the trees around the perimeter sucking on German tree sap and posting sticky-fingered selfies to the dump-worker fan page controlled by a dude named Holger. 

In the next town the weekly dump ritual is an orderly affair. You put plastics in a plastic bag (oh the genius of it) that you get from the dump workers inside the door at their low shed. You put cardboard, neatly folded flat, into the cardboard-folded-neatly-flat bin. You get the picture. Everything is labeled. No song and dance. 

All plastics go into a plastic bag at your house, did I mention that, then when you get to the dump in the next town you throw the whole bag, which, again, is itself plastic, into a big metallic bin. Then you drive off, unworried by the minutiae of the inner workings of the dump itself. The jockeying, the politics, the parking privileges, the vacation slots. 

It was so convenient that we preferred to drive an extra 10km to get to that dump rather than use our town's own dump. Drive in, dump, drive out. 

But since lockdown became a thing all of that dump convenience went out the window. Starting back in March you suddenly had to line up and wait in your car, out along the road next to the dog kennels which smell of dog poo and further back next to the horse stables which smelled of dog poo on steroids. 

The only time I went there during lockdown was that first day. I saw the line up. I thought "oh, I never seen a traffic jam at the dump before." No matter, I parked the car to the side under a tree and carried my three bags of plastics past about 20 cars waiting in line and strode straight in. The dump dude was so shocked to see a walk-in at the dump he didn't know what to say. He let me through. 

But the people in the cars, they all had to wait. They had a new rule, only two cars at a time were allowed in. Prior to lockdown you would see 8 and 10 and 12 cars inside at any one time. 

Everyone in their cars watched me with heightened envy. I could feel the hate penetrate my epidermis. I dumped my bags and walked back out past the same cars. I got in my car and drove back home.

But then my wife went the following week and had to sit and wait. Half an hour she moved 90 feet. She didn't get out and walk even though I told her exactly how to do it, walk, that is. 

She said they were not happy about us coming from another town to their dump. She forbids me now from returning. 

Hence the switch to our town's low shed-less dump. 

At our dump there are approximately 790 bins that you have to pre-sort your rubbish into. 

I would do it, in fact I have done it, but it never works out right. One week the small plastic bottles go in the small plastic container bin, the next week they go in the small plastic boxes bin. The next week they have to go in the loose plastic sheets bin and it was never any different than that you sonofabitch. 

Today I took our three plastic bags of plastic to our town dump and began opening the contents out into the free-range plastic bin. A woman of, I swear, less than 48 inches in height, started berating me. I don't know what she was saying. I thought she was struggling to reach her pincers to reach an errant plastic bottle someone else had thrown in the plastics bin. I offered to help. I opened my bags and let all my free-ranging plastics return once again to their rightful home - a big orange crushing bin at Steinenbronn. 

The tiny woman freaked out even more. 

"abu gutch kick lock straagggle baaaagle!" she said. 

"Good thanks," I said. "And you?"

She held up a plastic container and said, in German, "That doesn't go in this bin!"

"What is this bin for?" I said.

"Plastic!" she said. Like, obviously. 

"That plastic container is made of plastic," I suggested. 

"It goes in the other plastic bin!" she was almost yelling. Like it was the 100th time today. 

I held up a different plastic container, a peanut paste container. "And this one?"

"That one goes here in this bin!"

"Oh," I said. "And what's the difference?" 

Again she said "abu gutch kick lock straagggle baaaagle!"

"Gesundheit!" I said. "And the plastic bags here, do they go in this plastics bin?" 

"Of course not," she said. "They go over there in the plastic bags only free-range-plastics bin."

"Because?"

"abu gutch kick lock straagggle baaaagle!"