Living in my parents’ house, bin day was the most evasive day I knew. It’s the same damn day every week but never have I been able to remember it without being reminded. I thought that remembering things such as this was a part of moving into my own place, like a gift. Being the useless cretin I am, the vast majority of my sustenance came from packets, sachets, tins and jars, all of this waste accompanied with the empty beer bottles, cans and whatever else my entire friendship group leave in their wake week in week out, it is an overwhelming sea of trash.

For several weeks we forgot to take the bins out, resulting in us having to skulk out in the dead of night and drop our bags of garbage in the dumpsters behind shops and restaurants. Our suburb soon caught on to public enemy number one and had our backup bins locked up efficiently every night, game over. Once the dumping of our neglected trash had been brought to a halt it came down to leaving sticky notes everywhere, next to my bed, the wall you look at when you’re sitting on the loo, in the beer fridge, everywhere we knew we would be looking regularly.

But none the less, that faithful Thursday morning had come. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I marvelled at how early I had managed to rise, very unlike me. Going about my morning, making coffee, flicking through terrible breakfast show television and putting some real thought into what new realms of procrastination I could discover, my whole body was seized the a rumbling in the distance. Poised like a jungle cat I listened, the sound was getting closer and closer. As I turned my head slowly to my left, I glanced into the kitchen...

THE BINS!

Slamming my coffee down I brought a whole new meaning to the word coffee table, sprinting like a madman in my Adventure Time pyjamas, I was scooping cans into my arms in an attempt to wrestle as many as I could into the yellow bin as quickly as possible. The grumble was close, its mechanical claw screeching as if to be laughing at my struggle. I had managed to get as much of the rubbish into the bins out the back of the house as I could. Now for the sprint.

With the handle of yellow bin in my left and the red in my right, I took a deep breath, and commenced my frantic scramble from the back of the house to the main road out the front. Running over any object that stood in my path the bins were bouncing from wheel to wheel, I could hear the clang of cans hitting the floor behind me, no time for stragglers, the Promised Land on wheels was a house away. As I rocketed through the front yard I summoned strength from deep within and managed to scramble the bins up the stairs.

I had made it, looking up at the bearded bin man laughing at me sweating profusely in my Adventure Time shorts, I had made it. I watched with glee as my rubbish was lifted and poured out of my life for another week. Don’t forget bin day.