It’s that time of the year here around GrodsHQ when we load our hard rubbish onto the footpath and watch the vultures pick it over before the council trucks even arrive. McBec and I were carrying a broken-down old bookshelf that has been superceded out of the house this afternoon when I declared “twenty bucks says this’ll be gone by tomorrow morning.”

It was gone ten minutes later. I shit you not. And we live on a dead-end street with virtually zero pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

UPDATE (6:55pm): Broken VCR gone too.

The annual hard rubbish collection is always a bit of a laugh. In the days leading up to the collection date people place their cubic metre of crap on the footpath and then you watch those piles of junk slowly shrink as freaks roam the streets and pilfer whatever they can see. I was walking home from work yesterday and watched an old lady select the choicest (read: least bad) lengths of bamboo from a pile of broken, damp and rotting furniture. Ten minutes later I saw a young man with dreadlocks take a bent and rusty bike wheel from out the front of a house with a look of triumph on his face.

Here at GrodsHQ we didn’t have much to put out. A broken pedestal fan, a generic Van Gogh print in a cheap and nasty frame, and the bird hutch I built four months ago for the adopted bird just before it pissed off without a word of thanks for my efforts.

The picture was gone within 20 minutes. No real surprises there. But this evening I’m in the front room when a white van pulls up out the front of our house and a dirty and nervous looking man gets out. He walks purposefully up to our hard rubbish pile and takes the disintegrating bird hutch as if he’d been scoping it out for days. Placing it carefully in the back of the van he pauses momentarily to acknowledge his handiwork before driving off.

People are freaks.