I’ve said it a thousand times before, but typically, communal rules don’t pop up for no reason.

It’s usually just “hey, if everybody doesn’t do this, we’re all kinda screwed,” and yet we have a tendency to think that applies to all but us.

After enough of that, who wouldn’t turn into a bit of a Karen?

AITA For putting my neighbours garbage onto their front porches?

I live in a townhouse community.

We have communal garbage chutes outside that are divided into garbage, compost, and recycling.

The chutes have hatches on them you have to open and then simply drop the garbage down into a main collection room.

Seems simple enough.

However, my neighbours seem to be unable to do this for some reason and simply dump their garbage bags, recycle, everything on the ground outside of the chutes.

Some of them I imagine don’t want to touch the handles on the chutes, or are just lazy.

The management has sent multiple emails about this and the concerns regarding pests, rodents, and strata fees going up because someone has to be paid to clean up the mess on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.

So this is an ongoing problem with tons of warnings and complaints already.

Today I had enough and saw that several people had dumped their trash beside the chutes, spilling over onto the sidewalk.

A few of the pieces of trash were Amazon boxes with their addresses on them..

So I picked up the trash into those boxes, walked them over to their doors, and dropped them there.

As you can imagine, this wasn’t met well.

One of the neighbours saw me from their window and said, “What are you doing?” and I replied, “Apparently you dropped this, it wasn’t in the trash. Next time put it where it’s supposed to go”

They told me to “**** off” and I just walked away.

I emailed pictures of their mess to to property manager too, there’s a $50 fine for each time someone does it.

But now they’re doubting themselves.

Am I [a jerk] for doing this?

It’s just as easy to drop things down the chute as it is to walk over to them, drop your garbage all over the ground, and have someone else deal with it.

It’s a LOT of garbage.

Let’s check in with the comments:

People were very on their side.

The real question is, are the fines actually enforced?

But everyone rejoiced.

It doesn’t matter how you slice it – if you can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum for the good of your own community, you don’t get to call out anyone else.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.