Tiny pedal bins

Lessons and dirty protesting

Tiny pedal bins are in absolutely every hotel I’ve ever stayed in; budget to grand, tiny to large, local to far, far away.

T

hey are all deviant and if you take a closer look, you can see them grinning. They're delighted you've arrived and are looking forward to seeing you struggle and swear, basking in the knowledge that they've been designed to avoid the very thing they're made for.

Evil and shame

Whilst tiny pedal-bins are evil, the liner inside always looks a little ashamed of itself as it pokes unevenly out the top, a long suffering captive that wants rid of its horrid host as much as I do.

Depending on my mood I can sometimes see humour too; I can just imagine a tiny pedal bin doing stand-up, can't you?

But my mood - however buoyant before I arrive - will be ruined by the tiny pedal bin dance.

I'm sure you have your own version, but here's mine. It goes something like this …

The tiny pedal bin dance

I avoid the inevitable as long as I can but soon the time comes for me to use the tiny pedal bin.

I brace myself, encouraging myself internally that this time just might be different, “Other people must be able to use tiny pedal-bins, surely I can too!” I say to myself and stretch out my toes to find its tiny pedal. 

Shuffleboard

But, as usual, I push the tiny bin further under the massive sink unit, playing a kind of tiny-bin shuffleboard - a game I always lose. 

With my tiny tormenter now jammed right at the back, I have to reach under the unit risking all manner of new dirt as well as having to grab the bin with my hands - hands-free rubbish disposal? I don't think so. It's either that or balance on one foot and reach underneath with the other, scooping it back out with my toes. Sometimes I'm lucky and manage to get it back to base in order to start all over again. 

Why, I wonder, do I always put it back where it started?

Dirty protest

Eventually I'll shout something along the lines of, “Come here you little ****er” and throw my rubbish on the floor in a dirty protest.

But I’m not ready to give up yet. I stretch out my big toe and manage to get the lid to open. 

Pot-holing

Lid now open and core engaged, I delicately drag the bin closer to me with my exhausted toe to perform some ‘pot-holing’.

But even when the physics line up, it’s a dizzying height for the rubbish to accurately fall and, often enough the rubbish ends up bouncing off the edge and landing once again, on the floor.

The bin liner seems to look at me apologetically, willing me to find another way.

“Wouldn't it be easier to throw all the rubbish on the floor, out of sight under the sink?” I wonder, it ends up there anyway. I don’t have to clear it up in a hotel, isn’t that the point?

But I’m too compliant, too ‘good’. If there’s a bin, I must use it.

Another question that occurs to me, why must these bins be pedal? What is so bad that I cannot bear to see the contents of my own ablutions? A public toilet is one thing but if it's my dirt, honestly, I can handle it!

No fires in the bathroom please

My friend Jason tells me it's for health and safety. But why is it OK to start a fire in the bedroom (where normal bins hangout) and not in the bathroom - the one place where there’s plenty of water?

Even if it must be ‘pedal’, can we not have normal, human-sized ones?

Back to school

Eventually I began to try alternatives. 

First, I brought in the bedroom bin to the bathroom, but what used to be a nice normal sized opening has now been beautifully designed with a wavy divider down the middle to host both recycling and normal rubbish. They've made a bin that used to perform perfectly into another annoying game where everything bounces off one of the bin's many edges and ends up on the floor.

What's wrong with bin designers? It's hardly a difficult engineering challenge … If they're going to insist on making it hard, they should lean in and have some fun with it. Maybe make it like that 70s game with the wire so that when you hit the side it buzzes. 

Better still, add some real jeopardy. If the rubbish doesn't get through without touching the sides you get shot and put out of your misery. I could live with such a demise, at least I'd have feel more like a willing participant. 

Anyway, last time I took out the inside of the tiny pedal-bin and placed it on top of the outer bin. It was still a little tricky to get things in but at least I had a closer hole to ‘pot’ into and no intricate toe maneuvers to perform. I think the bin liner enjoyed getting out for a bit too.

Then I just put the inside bin on top of the sink unit. It's beautifully simple but not so pretty.

Finally …

There are of course plenty of solutions and I realised eventually that however evil or rubbish the bin is, it's my compliance that's at fault. “Just stop using the bin, Claire - remove the problem.”

It's taken over 50 years for me to learn this lesson and even longer to remember I've already learned it ... just like getting a bit of rubbish in the bin, you have to do it a few times to really get it.

And I'm grateful to have lived long enough to learn it.

So, next time I'm going to rescue  the captive bin liner and just hang it on the door. Together we can be free of something  that just doesn't work for us … that or just indulge in dirty protesting.