Strangest thing has happened to us today. On Saturday we had the paper recycling collection for our area, as we have done for the past three years we put our paper neatly into shopping bags and put it out for collection. Then this morning we found all the paper dumped at our building door in a mess.
Now someone has either decided that placing the paper in bags is not good enough (it evidently must be tied) or they have randomly dropped it outside our building and left it in a mess. I can only think a) someone was watching us put it out and realised it us (seems creepy if so) or b) they went through all the paper to identify an address so they can track down the culprit but not had the guts to tell us we are doing something wrong.
Has this sort of thing happened to anyone else? As yet we have not tidied the mess and I am half tempted just to leave it considering we are moving out this month but I feel too sorry for our good neighbours to do that.
It's a Swiss thing. A similar thing happened to us once with four black sacks of household rubbish. We had only just moved and had inadvertantly put it into the wrong wheelie bin.
So, instead of the peeper advising us of our error at the time, about two months (!!) later it appeared on the doorstep outside our flat, within the communal parts.
I got this treatment when I was first in CH in 1994.
I left those apartments shortly after but would always go back & dump my paper into the container making sure nothing to identify myself. I carried on for a couple of years knowing somebody who had nothing better to do than look for a name!
However, because so many of us are just not used to this sort of behaviour, our natural instinct is to be pixxed off at the shear pettiness of it all and to retaliate in some small way.
Nope. If you lived in the middle of a field okay. If your neighbors also have to step over your shit because you can't be arsed to clean it up - not okay. It's your attitude I find wrong.
I would leave it in front of the apartment building...and not worry about it. Contact the agency and let them know the issue, as surely the culprit has already contacted the agency and told them his/her side of the story already.
In your cases, these have at least been, presumably, the silent ones peeping out and keeping a "watch". Our case was even more interesting. In our first or the second month in the Swiss German part, we had used a wrong trash bag to throw our garbage. This was obviously unintentional and a mistake. I remember stepping out with that trash bag at around 2100hrs in the month of December. As I dumped it in the garbage trolley I remember thinking to myself that the bag didn't seem right. However, I had too many things on my mind at that time. I forgot about it and got on with whatever I was doing.
In two months' time, we received a letter (A4 size) from the Gemeinde, quoting various statutes, admonishing us for our mistake and warning us that repetition of such thing again would result in a fine of some CHF600 (don't remember the exact figure).
Our Swiss friends advised us to go to the dumping yard pronto and explain the "mistake", which we did. We were "let off" with a stern warning.
Our Swiss friends explained that, like so many other types of Police in Switzerland, there are "Garbage Police" whose job it is to catch delinquents like us. What impressed me was the dedication of the person doing this, going through our garbage, looking for clues and then eventually nailing it on us.
As far I am concerned, its a lesson well learnt. Even after ten years and now in the Swiss French part, I am still nervous every time I take the garbage out.
...and if the bag gets wet it disintegrates and if the bag tips, the contents fall out. I don't know about your area, but here the youngsters from the clubs in the town collect the paper to get extra money. They often throw the bundles onto the trucks and sometimes they are thrown again to put them into the railway waggons. You can imagine how many carrier bags might fall apart or loose their contents in the process. Here, newspapers not tied usually get left and, by the next morning, are spread around by the wind or, I guess, the folk coming home from their evening out... See the sticky on the subject here.
So...this reminds me. Does 'paper' recycling in CH mean ONLY newsPAPER? Back in the US, paper included just about everything but cardboard, so I have reflexively filled my recycling bin with flattened cereal boxes, junk mail, random papers from the post and ephemera like tp and paper towel rolls. After noticing for the past few months that it only appears to be obsessively squared and tied stacks of newspaper, does what I have in my bin go to the garbage or is there a place for it to be recycled? Probably a dumb question, but I'm on my second glass of wine after a long afternoon so, humour me.