Talkin' Trash

As a public school teacher, I am always eager to find new and different ways to interface with the community around me. Yesterday afternoon I was afforded such an opportunity when the head of our after school program stuck her head in the room and said, "Somebody just called the office to say that some guy is throwing trash all over the sidewalk across the street." There was a brief discussion, and I offered to be the one to go check it out.
Heading down the hallway and down the stairwell, it did occur to me that one of the options I had was to ignore the situation. After all, "some guy" wasn't dumping trash on school property. He was tossing it onto the sidewalk across the street from school property. When I got outside and looked across the intersection, I saw the offending mess, but "some guy" was gone. Crossing the street, I noticed that the pile had been heaped up next to the fence so that anyone wanting to walk to our school would have to traipse around or wade ankle-deep through the Hefty bags of old clothes, broken toys, and miscellaneous household goods that "some guy" tossed.
As I was busily assessing the situation, I was approached by a pair of rather gruff looking gentlemen, one of whom stopped grumbling into his cell phone long enough to look at me and inquire, "Did you put that garbage on my truck?" Except that he used much more colorful language to describe the potential circumstance.
"Uh, no," I assured him as I pushed a set of Levilor blinds out of the way with my foot.
"Some guy thought he was being a good citizen and tossed this stuff on my truck," he continued, only much more colorfully. "I'm not willing to pay to haul away somebody else's garbage."
That's when I realized what had happened. I was talking to "some guy," who had only moved a pile of trash from his truck back to the street where it had been since "some other guy" had left it there over the weekend. I promised "some guy" that I would keep my eye out for both the guy who tossed the trash back on his truck and the original miscreant who had unloaded his dumpster on the sidewalk in the first place.
It is, after all, what I do.