Sweep your own porch first
Then take care of everybody’s business
There’s been a war waging behind our closed doors for the last couple of days, making my boyfriend very agitated. Fortunately, the war’s been taking place on the outside of our front doors and — though it makes for a less juicy read — it’s been literally about sweeping porches.
We share the ground floor with four other apartments, one of which is a beauty salon with quite some foot traffic. Yet again, any small piece of trash dropped on the floors of the ground floor somehow finds its way to our porch.
We’ve picked the trash up several times before without making a big deal about it, but not this time. As it happens, we hadn’t left our apartment for the last 14 days — quarantine, remember?
Being petty burns fewer calories than picking up trash
We first noticed the tissue on the floor when my boyfriend’s parents delivered food to our doorstep some 5 days ago. It was already then close to our doormat, but we didn’t think to pick it up as we clearly hadn’t dropped it on the floor this time.
Days passed and our quarantine finished, yet the tissue had moved a little bit closer to our doormat. Annoyed because this wasn’t the first time this had happened, my boyfriend pushed the tissue further away from our doormat as we were leaving our apartment for the first time in two weeks.
We came back a couple of hours later to a sighting of that same tissue — again on our doormat! Let’s call the tissue Betty White, as it must be in very good shape to be able to move around like that.
The revenge of Betty White
Now even more determined to put an end to this, we wrote a note on a A4 piece of paper in all caps that said: “PLEASE DON’T PUSH OTHER PEOPLE’S TRASH IN FRONT OF OUR FRONT DOOR, THANK YOU”. To think you have to ask people not do to that…
We went out again, curious at what’s going to await us when we get back home.
And man, we got more than we bargained for.
There they were, the whole gang: Betty White and a couple of newcomers! There was a coupon booklet for a local supermarket turned on the side with Durex products, and two pizza flyers that comically read “Open when you’re nervous” (my boyfriend did in fact open it to check for additional hate messages, and none were noticed). That’s four for the price of one!
We had to be strategic about our next move, as ping-ponging with Betty White hadn’t proved to be much of a success. So I produced an ingenious passive-aggressive idea: We pinned Betty and the gang to the community notice board on the wall next to our apartment. Ha! Let’s see if somebody makes an effort to take them down now.
Nobody’s business is everybody’s business
Now that you have the full story, let’s play out the likely scenario that has brought Betty the tissue to our front porch.
I believe someone very tidy had noticed a tissue on the floor in the proximity of our apartment and simply assumed it was our mess, so it was our responsibility to clean it up (in their mind). I mean, imagine how tidy did this person has to be to rather invest energy in moving the tissue around multiple times than to pick it up and throw it away.
The first several times this had happened, we didn’t go to court over who left the trash lying around — we simply picked it up so there would no longer be trash on the floor. But there comes a time when the line between being decent and being stupid becomes too fine.
There is a minimum of 5 people living on the ground floor, and some 50 people living in the rest of the building. Someone else could have picked it up. Funny enough, that must be what they thought, as well as they walked past that trash or pushed in the general direction of our apartment. Well, this time, someone else will have to do it. Or so we hoped.
The saying “Sweep your own front porch first” implies to deal with your own problems before you get involved in someone else's. Given the quite literal context we‘re dealing with here, I’d like to extend its meaning.
Sweep your own porch first. You did? Good for you.
If you notice some other trash in the common area adjacent to the area you just tidied up, don’t push it in front of your neighbors' porches to make it their problem. Sometimes, the problem isn’t anyone’s, which also makes it everyone’s problem — not the problem of the neighbor in front of whose front door you just kicked it.
My mama taught me better than that
I don’t make a fuss about picking up an odd piece of trash, but I will make a fuss about everyone else refusing to do so.
One thing that always triggered me is seeing clothes on the floor at shops.
The dropping it part is not a problem — it’s happened a million times to an experienced shopper like myself. It’s not picking it up part I just can’t understand. Have you been raised by wolves not to know that you should pick up something if you drop it? Or are you just rude and ill-mannered?
What’s worse, once Proud Mary goes her own way, leaving the article of clothing on the floor, it’s all downhill — everyone assumes the “WELL I DIDN’T DROP IT SO WHY SHOULD I PICK IT UP” attitude. While it’s technically correct, it’s not right.
I’ve picked up clothes that other people had dropped a thousand times before, simply because I hated seeing them on the floor. Did I feel like doing it? No. I certainly did not enjoy it. But I wasn’t indolent enough to walk past it, or as I’ve seen people do, walk over it.
Yes, I do know that there are people employed in those shops whose job it is to put it back on the hanger. But my parents taught me to treat both people and things better than that.
If it’s in your way, put it away
Today’s act of kindness is to put away the odd piece of junk you come across and put back a dropped article of clothing — regardless of the fact that you weren’t the one to put it there.
It’s not beneath you to pick up what’s underneath you.
P.S. As for Betty White, I’ll just give it a day before I take the gang down from the pinboard and into the trashcan unless someone beats me to it. Stay tuned!
