Put Out The Recycling Bin The Wrong Way

I had a function with the alumni club Wednesday night, then wanted to spend time surfing on the Internet with my new tablet at Caffetto before going home.

Got home at around 11, then hung out in the car listening to the end of an extra-inning game, won by St. Louis over the Dodgers.  Recycling comes every other Thursday, and this is our week.  Father did not take out the bin, which is stashed at the side of the house, behind a gate.  So I did.

However, I forgot which way I'm supposed to leave it.  They have a sign on the lid saying "Arrows Point To Street," but since it was so goddamn dark out, that's the only thing I could tell from the faint streetlight -- the one that's off more times than on these days, thereby making me doubt my "orientation" -- and I couldn't remember where the arrows on the lid were.  When I went to close the gate I thought about trying to, for example, turn on my cellphone and use that light to find the arrows.  But I figured I had it right because of the other things that distinguish the correct orientation of the bin: wheels out and push handle out.

Well, that was 180 degrees wrong!  I got out of the house this afternoon and saw that I put out the bin exactly in the wrong direction.  I guess I'm lucky that they emptied the bin anyway; the recyclers have done this so many times they can spot from several houses away when a household fucked up such a simple task.

There was a little more risk to this particular pick-up however, I'm afraid.  I don't think it'd be a big deal if it was just newspapers and cans and shit.  But there was also shards of glass in there.  See, last week, while I was at my storage unit, one of the bottles I had been saving (did I blog about this before?) fell to the ground one too many times off the other stuff I've piled into this thing and shattered.  So I took it home and dumped it in the recycling bin.

I didn't think it would be a problem ... but it might be a needless complication if I also screwed up the orientation of the bin.  I don't know how it works, but if they put arrows on the bin, it probably is taken up by a machine so no worker needs to come out and manually throw the contents into the truck.  But if it's the wrong way, maybe someone needs to get out of the truck and help and possibly getting sharp glass raining down on him (even though I found it the following afternoon in the same direction I left it, namely the wrong way, meaning it doesn't look like a sanitation worker turned it around).  Maybe I should have called the company and warned them about the glass?

Well, I hope this doesn't bite us in the ass.  I'm really scared those guys will come back in two weeks and do something to the bin or us for fucking up.