I appreciate her work. Really I do. In fact, she’s one of the reasons I don’t particularly want an apartment with a private bathroom next year. (Well, not her specifically, but the janitorial staff in general.) They do a good job in general, but the one on my hall has some serious passive-aggression going on. Maybe she feels unappreciated. I’m probably the only person (except perhaps my roommates) near me who actually say hi, etc. But she will not stop leaving our trash cans in the doorway.

If my room were not on the end of the hallway, ie if there were some way I could actually get to the door without dragging the trash bins out of the doorway, maybe I wouldn’t mind so much. But generally I don’t come to my room empty-handed — I’m probably carrying a bag and maybe a cup of tea or something, and I see these two stacks of bins outside my door. I would kick them out of the way, but where can I kick them?

We generally put trash out against the walls, so that there is actual walking space. When the bins are flush against the walls, no one’s path is obstructed. People come in and go out the stairwell fine. Nobody is so wide that they need more than a yard-wide hallway to walk. Why can the bins not be put back where we put them? Is it passive prodding so that we will take our bins back in? Is it so we know which bins are ours? Furthermore, since the university is so concerned that we would not find our doors in an emergency if we put things (posters, post-its, signs, etc) on our doors, what exactly would they think of trashcans actually obstructing the doorway? After all, if these trashcans were inside our quad, obstructing a doorway, we would surely be fined, but it’s okay outside?

I’m really sorely tempted to go out right before she makes her rounds every day and move all the hallway trashcans to the bathrooms’ doorways. Just to let her know what I think of it.

My suite has been coffee-scented since yesterday, and I notice it only when I first come back to it. Why is it that I don’t notice the absence of coffee when I leave?