A few months ago, someone put a large, Rubbermaid-ish trash can next to the sidewalk that leads from the parking lot to my office. This wouldn't necessarily be strange except for the fact that there were already two nice stone trash cans there: one on either side of the pavement. But I figured, maybe the trash people don't feel like they get down here often enough to empty the trash, so they thought a third trash can would improve the situation. Whatever.
The funny thing about it, in my mind, was not so much the fact that it was there, but rather, the fact that someone had taped a sign on it saying, "Trash Only Please." Now, I could be a punctuation junkie and say that without the necessary comma in that sentence, it appears that they want you to throw your "please's" into the trash and nothing else. But that's just the working of an over-literal mind. Really, the funny thing was that someone felt the need for the sign to be there at all. I mean, what else were we going to put in there: water balloons? dirty laundry? It's sitting outside in a parking lot, for goodness sakes. What else would you put in it other than trash?
So every morning and evening, I would giggle or roll my eyes when I walked past the new trash can (depending on my mood).
This morning, as I walked past it, I saw that someone had turned it upside down. So now, we have this third (unneccessary) trash can where the sidewalk meets the parking lot, and it has a sign that is very specific as to what should be put in it (i.e., trash), and now someone has realized the silliness of even having it out there and the apparent unnecessariness of emptying it, and that person has decided not to take it away, as logic might demand, but rather, to simply turn it over, leaving it as a monument to the stupidity of mankind.
People do funny things sometimes.
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