The house next door to me is occupied by somewhere between 4 and 17 female students. Since it's a 4 bedroom house I'm guessing the true figure is nearer the lower end of my estimated range, but aside from the amount of noise they can make using the stairs, there is one particular conundrum: they seem to generate the kind of volumes of rubbish you might reasonably expect from a small but thriving coffee shop.
Bin day is Friday, by which time the bin's lid is stretched open like a yawning pelican's bill, black sacks hanging over the edge in what I believe the fashion industry describes as a 'muffin top'. Muffin top rubbish: fact. Yet by Sunday it's full again, and by mid-week there is a pile of binbags outside in our shared yard too.
What the hell are they doing?
The only conclusion I can draw is that these young ladies, with a solid secondary education receding behind them, find the academic and social opportunities of one of our finer universities is just, somehow, well err...., like not enough. There's something missing. What could it be? What is creating that cavernous feeling in their souls? I began to think, could I get away with installing a listening device through the wall, to see if I could detect what it is that's eating them up?
My advisors suggested such surveillance would be frowned upon, so instead I devised a scenario-modelling system, which I'm testing to destruction and is currently standing up well. I call it CAGNET - Conjecture and Guesswork Nearly Every Time [is right]. So I ran the model using four key variables, and the results were enlightening.
The variables were:
1. The number of people normally generating rubbish in the household
2. The likely consumption habits of those people.
3. The ability of those people to compress their rubbish before throwing it away.
4. The time available in the average day that could be dedicated to the act of throwing things away.
The conclusions I drew were as follows.
1. There are four tenants. One is addicted to milk, and is unaware of the squashability of plastic milk flagons after they are emptied. [Lacto-noncompressive Compulsive Disorder].
2. One tenant is a Business student who has sub-let the cellar as a basement business incubator which is occupied by a packaging company with scrupulous quality control procedures.
3. One tenant won the Tetrapak Icelandic Lottery and the first prize was a lifetime supply of 1 litre guava juice cartons.
4. One tenant is a science student undertaking exhaustive stress-testing on binliners.
All of which points to a worrying set of circumstances and positive feedbacks pushing the household to a wheelie-bin tipping point: that entrepreneurship, quality control, gambling, science, the stresses of modern life and associated dietary disorders are......
FRANKLY UNSUSTAINABLE.
Those readers who think students are just a bunch of layabouts, and that higher education is a giant holding camp saving people from having to be unemployed, had better go elsewhere for their reading pleasure, there is no place for you here. My neighbours' rubbish habits are a product of a modern age in which being a student is hard work.
AW.
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