Unfiltered Story #288406

My wife and I are quite close with the neighbors on one side of our house, the neighbors on the other side, not so much. Not that they are bad people, just private.

Often, when there is a big storm on garbage night, we end up with someone else’s recycling bin in our front yard. That is not surprising as we are one of the few houses on the street with hedges on both sides, so we tend to be a natural backstop for things that blow around.

We always leave the recycling bin sitting out for a few days and usually the owners come and retrieve them. However, since our next door neighbors moved in a few years ago, we keep ending up with bins that blow into our yard and are never claimed. I tried putting them on the property line between us and our neighbors to see if the bins were theirs but they never took them.

Consequently, we ended up with almost a dozen recycling bins.

A few months ago, our neighbors started marking their recycling bins with “STOLEN FROM [THEIR ADDRESS]”. We thought it was a bit passive aggressive for people who couldn’t keep track of their recycling bins.

So we started sneaking recycling bins back to them. Every garbage night, we would wait until they had put their bins out and then we would add one from our hoard to their pile. We did this for months until we were down to our original set of bins.

The neighbors, in typical fashion, haven’t said anything to us about it, but it makes us chuckle every time we think about it.