The Great Trash Can Caper: When Helping Others Becomes a Municipal Offense

Today’s example of bureaucratic overreach and the challenges of urban compassion

Have you ever looked out your front window to see the city packing up all your trash cans? I suspect maybe not. (It’s happened to me on more than one occasion.)

This was the picture from the front of my house a few minutes ago:

Here’s how it works:

Every address in Akron is allowed 3 regular trash cans and 1 recycle can.

So, I put out 6 trash cans and 2 recycle cans every week because I own a duplex.

The problem is: I have 9 trash cans total on my property. (Apparently city workers can walk on your property and dig around your stuff any time they want. That also happens to me on WAY more than one occasion.)

Here’s the situation:

Homeless people steal trash cans. They use them for scrapping.

They scrap with them literally until the wheels fall off. Then they park them somewhere (often in my yard) and then fill them with trash.

So, I take them because they are filled with some of the most ridiculously heavy trash you’ve ever experienced. They become impossible to dump or do anything with. I take them home. I put them out on the street to get picked up one time and then I don’t know what to do with them. I mean… what do you do with a city trash can? You can’t throw it away. So they end up collecting beside my garage.

The guy in this truck clearly had seen behind my truck, in my backyard, that I had these cans. He decided to enact trash can justice and was determined to take these cans. (Why did calling someone correct his thinking? It’s like he’s the Batman of trash cans. Trash can vigilantism.)

The funny thing is: he said: “You are allowed 3 cans per address. There are 2 addresses here. You can have 6 cans.”

I said, “That’s right. I own a duplex and so I have 6 cans.”

He said, “That’s not what you have here.”

We were staring directly at 6 cans and one recycle can in his truck.

I think he didn’t want to admit that he was poking around my property.

At any rate, he called someone, and they agreed that I was allowed a total of 6 cans and 2 recycle cans. He brought back my 6 cans and I was able to give him the old, wheel-less cans. It worked out fine.

I truly believe there are forces at play that don’t want me to help homeless people. (90% of anything I’ve EVER done for homeless people is clean up their trash. I probably only need one can at most for my own trash. I use the other 5 for homeless people. (I’m really reluctant to say that because I’m sure there’s a trash law somewhere that says the trash has to be trash from your own residence. But whatever.))

I mean, for sure, there are forces in the city that don’t want me to help these people. That’s evident. But I also believe there are cosmic/spiritual forces that don’t want me to help either.

“No good deed goes unpunished” is as real a statement as any there ever was.

The question I always ask myself is: What side of humanity are the forces trying to stop me from helping? Are the pro-human forces trying to stop me from helping because I’m pulling down the entire species by not letting nature take its course? Or are the anti-human forces trying to stop me because they’re just assholes? I don’t know.

Helping is the right thing to do, even if it means the destruction of humanity. I don’t think I’d kill one person to save the rest of the planet. That’s just who I am.