I was taking the girl from across the road to school this morning and when asked about year two at school she said: er zijn meer regels in groep twee dan in groep één.
En in groep drie zijn er meer regels en in groep vier zelfs meer, my son J continued.
Ik ben in groep honderd, I said. In groep honderd zijn er héél veel regels.
Which is true. It’s just not always clear what the rules are once you’re in groep grown-up.
Take the refuse collection where I live. It is moetish to the extreme and can be used as an example if anyone is trying to tell you that Holland is so liberal and easy-going and tolerant and bla bla bla.
The refuse collection here is so moetish that for the last two weeks they haven’t emptied our wheelie bins. Even though we put them out.
The refuse collectors are the really strict teachers of groep honderd. There’s no well you’re misbehaved this time, but you’ll know not to do it next time. It’s all you haven’t stuck to the rules so you shall be punished and we shall not be emptying your wheelie bin. They’d be thrashing us with belts if they could.
As parents I thought we were somewhere in the middle on the scale with the niks-moet-alles-maggery parenting you see more in HET WESTEN (that evil place) at one end and belt-thrashing moetishness at the other end.
In terms of wheelie bins and training people like us to do what the binmen want I can see that we are more at the niks-moet-alles-mag end of the scale.
So we’re gradually working out the binmen’s rules. This involves a lot of backward engineering because half of the rules are undocumented and if you do break a rule and are punished with an unemptied bin you are not informed of which rule exactly it was that you have broken.
So far we know the rule about it being your green bin one week and the black one the next. That one is written down in their constitution.
And we know the rule about them having to be put out before 7:00 (!!) in the morning on collection day. We have, however, realised, with a bit of undercover detective work, that the binmen come later than 7:00, so therefore tend to ignore this rule because we get up at 7:00 and wheelie bins aren’t the first things on our minds in the morning.
We also know the next rule, again a written one, about NOT being able to put them out the evening before. Some people do this, and so do we if we remember, so we think this is a rule that can be broken.
The next rule is one we have learnt ourselves – it’s one of the unwritten ones. The wheelie bins have to be put right at the edge of the pavement so the stretchy arm on the bin lorry can pick them up. If you don’t, they don’t empty your bin.
I now understand the man who came and told me off once when I had just parked the car and was moving his wheelie bin back from where it was looming over the kerb and meant that I couldn’t open the door. He was obviously on wheelie bin surveillance to make sure that his wheelie bin would be emptied and didn’t want silly people moving it back to a belt-thrashing your bin is a centimetre too far back from the kerb, so we shall not empty it position.
The next unwritten rule, which my husband J forgot last week, is that they have to be placed not just right on the edge of the kerb but with the lid opening towards the road. If, as he discovered last week, you put them the other way round you will be punished and they will NOT be emptied.
If the binmen were slightly more permissive they might have turned the bin round and emptied it this time with maybe a sticker saying dear valued customer we’ve emptied it this time but please put it the right way round next time because otherwise we might strain our backs turning it round.
But they’re not permissive, so the bin stayed unemptied.
This week’s rule is still unclear to me. I put the wheelie bin out. I did put it out at 9:00 in the morning instead of before 7:00, but I peeked in another bin to see if the binmen had been yet and they hadn’t. Maybe they have CCTV and can see what time you put your bin out. Maybe the chip in the bins that registers if your bin has been emptied and consequently bills you sends a signal to the stretchy arm on the bin lorry that makes it refuse to accept your bin if it’s been put out after 7:00.
Did you put it on the painted line? J asked when I told him they hadn’t emptied the bin again.
What painted line? I answered.
Apparently there are lines on the pavement showing where to put the bin. I’d never noticed them before. The pavement was full of bins when I got there this time, so I put the bin on the corner. I did half-wonder whether there might be a rule about not putting your wheelie bin on a corner, but there were other bins there, so I thought it would be ok.
So there’s two possible new rules for this week: don’t put your wheelie bin on the corner or put your bin on the painted line. Or it’s just the old not after 7:00 rule.
I know next week’s rule already: don’t stamp your rubbish down into the bin to make it all fit in - luckily I’m too small for the jumping on the the rubbish in the wheelie bin job so the tall person in our house has to do it - because if it doesn’t fall out we won’t make any effort to make sure it does.
And we’re now in that vicious circle of a full bin that won’t be emptied if you compact the rubbish into the bin, but if you put the rubbish in bin bags next to the bin, they won’t be taken either. The only solution, as we have discovered before, is sneakily putting a bag in other people’s wheelie bins.
Still, trying to think of a positive angle here, it has saved us money because they charge per emptying here. It’s been a long week.