Some Fucker Stole My Rubbish Bins

Hello everyone! A terrible thing has happened. To me!

The title is probably a bit of a giveaway, but  some fucker has nicked my rubbish bins.

THIS IS A PICTURE OF MY FRIEND’S BINS BECAUSE I CAN’T TAKE A PICTURE OF MY BINS BECAUSE SOME FUCKER HAS NICKED THEM.

To date I have experienced a very limited amount of your classic homeowner problems, apart from paying insurance (understandable, not really a ‘problem’ per se) and paying rates (less understandable because it cannot cost over $2,000 a year to keep me supplied with water, I am not a Big Fish.)

Anyway, as part of the rates, the Council supplies a very nice and useful service called “Rubbish Collection,” which you may be familiar with. You put your rubbish in the wheelie bin* and once a week the council comes and collects the bin and goes and disposes of the rubbish in some undoubtedly very environmentally friendly way and sadly, this is where this post’s positive comments about the Council have to end.

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*very old joke from my father:
A man goes outside the night before rubbish collection, and sees his neighbour coming out of his house, without his rubbish bin.
”Hey,” he calls across the street, “where’s ya bin?”
“I’ve bin in Nelson!” the neighbour replies.
”Nah mate, where’s ya wheelie bin?”
”Oh I wheelie bin in jail.”

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Because Christchurch is a progressive city of rubbish nerds, we have a three-bin system; red bin for inorganic waste (‘rubbish,’ if you will); yellow bin for recycling; green bin for organic waste (grass clippings and shit). Bear with me, this bin background (binkground) is important when we get to the bit of the story where some fucker steals my bins. I shouldn’t have put that in the headline, this post has lost all suspense.

The bins alternate, so on Week One you put out Red Bin / Green Bin, Week Two you put out Yellow Bin / Green Bin. I know, it is confusing. Luckily there is an app*. Isn’t it marvellous to live in the future!

YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING ABOUT THE APP DIDN’ T YOU

Speaking of bins and the future, and I am surprised that those two topics fit together so well, about three years ago the Council did a Wheelie Bin Stocktake - and yes that is actually what they called it - where they microchipped the bins, “to ensure bins that were damaged, stolen or found on other properties could be easily identified.”  It was also to stop people putting out Too Many Bins and depriving us bin-law-abiding ratepayers of Getting Less Bin Stuff Than The Naughty Double Binners.  To you or I this might not matter much, but to the Council it matters $9.3M in revenue saved from Illegitimate Bins, which they no longer have to collect.

So now when the rubbish truck goes past it checks the electronic tags on your bins and if they are not, in fact, your bins, they will remain unemptied and will sit forlornly on the street until you come home and go “aww fuck they didn’t do my bins.”

Ok that’s enough binkground. Onto the main event.

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*unless you are my mum, in which case you just txt my aunt and say “is it Australia or Christmas?”

IT’S AUSTRALIA!

Let me set the scene for this crime -

It was a dark and stormy night, except probably not actually because it was summer, but let’s imagine it was. I put Yellow and Green bins out for collection, and then I went to sleep or something, and then the next day I went to work and I came home and I noted with some satisfaction that the bins had been relieved of their rubbishy contents and I wheeled the bins back off the kerb to their home outside my garage and I wandered off to do whatever it is I do with my life these days.

And then I came back to the house later and the BINS were GONE.

I was shaken to my very core by the sheer rudeness of nicking someone’s bins, but also confident that the Council would be able to look up the bin microchips and go “oh they’re in the river we’ll send you a couple of new bins” and I would say “hooray hoorah thank you Council I am so glad I get to pay my rates.”

However when I rang the Council, it did not go that way.  Here is the way it go’d:  

Me: “Hello, this is Ally, some fucker has nicked my bins.”
A Nice Council Person: “Ok, where were the bins?”
Me: “…at my house?”
ANCP: “Were they on the street?”
Me: “No, they were on the driveway outside my garage.”
ANCP: “Unfortunately unless the bins were stolen from the street before 6pm on the day of collection we are unable to provide replacement bins.”
Me: “what”
ANCP: “Good news it’s only $100 per bin to replace them would you like to pay for those over the phone by credit c-”
Me: “NO THANK YOU”

So it turns out the microchipping is purely for the purpose of saving revenue by not collecting illicit bins, not bin recovery.  Also according to that news story way back up at the top of this post 300 bins are reported missing EVERY MONTH.  

It seems that perhaps some revenue is also being recovered from bin-replacing.

“$30,000 per month in new bins is a lot of cost for the Council to wear,” I hear you say.  Well yes, but it cost them $4.5M to microchip the bins in the first place!  They are saving $9.3M in revenue over the next 10 years!  GIVE ME MY BINS!

For now I am resigned to my binless future but I do have some questions:

1.      What if the rubbish truck finds your bin outside your neighbour’s house, using the chip?  Will they return it?  What if you’ve already bought your new bins?  Do you then get to use all your bins, or only your original bins? What if in the time between when your bins were nicked and when your neighbour gained the courage to use them, you’ve become attached to your new bins? Do you get to choose which bins you keep?  Is it possible that to avoid all these questions the council would just… not return your bins? Surely not.  Surely not.

2.      If the microchipping is in fact trackable from a distance of more than rubbish-truck-to-kerb, what is the purpose of this functionality? Is there a man in an office somewhere who sits at his desk on collection day and brings up the tracking system and watches the tide of bins roll gently in and out and goes hohoho, ahhh, how relaxing?

3.      Why has nobody set up a company selling bin insurance? There must be a market for someone to set up a system where $1 per bin, per week gives you full bin cover in the apparently-not-that-unlikely event that some fucker nicks your bins.

Anyway where I am going with this is a) please don’t nick bins it is traumatic and b) does anybody want to invest in a potentially not very legally sound bin insurance company and c) if you are in Christchurch and happen to have ‘acquired’ a set of spare bins please can I have them, because at the moment I only have the red bin, and I’m too scared to put him out.

HE IS ALL I HAVE LEFT.