Cents & Nonsense:The young woman held the lid open with one hand and pawed the contents with the other. A neighbour, who was out walking, saw her in the driveway. The woman stopped what she was doing.
They both stared at one another. It was High Noon at the OK Corral. Slowly, the young woman lowered the lid and sauntered away down the street.
When I returned home the other day that was the story I was told. While I was out, a woman was going through my bins. I felt violated. What could she possibly want from my rubbish? Our bins are ordinary.
Nothing about them hints at extra special contents - they don't have a happy face or butterfly stickers or a fancy house name painted in gold.
I know I shouldn't really feel possessive about discarded items. In many countries, once an item is thrown away it no longer legally belongs to the person who placed it in the bin. This incident shouldn't be a big deal but it still bothers me and it worries my neighbours.
The big questions are: was she hungry, up to something sinister or on the cutting edge of a trendy new global movement?
This tidy, healthy-looking young woman is familiar to everybody in the village. She knocks on our doors every few weeks and asks for spare change. Most people give her something so I'm fairly certain she is not going hungry.
So, what the hell was she doing in my bins? The neighbour wasn't sure which bin - black, green or brown - the woman molested. Grass clippings and household refuse are hardly of interest so it must have been the green bin. Was she trying to steal the junk mail and old newspapers or, wait for it, my identity? Although it sounds like the plot to a bad 1990s Hollywood film starring Sandra Bullock, identity theft is an emerging problem in Ireland.
Financial identity theft occurs when somebody obtains your name and address plus any other identifying information such as bank account or credit card numbers, PINs, passwords, mother's maiden name, age, gender, occupation or PPS number.
Once they have enough information they can open credit card and bank accounts in your name then use them to buy goods and services or launder money. By the time a credit provider blocks the account, the criminals are long gone and you are stuck with a bad credit rating.
Criminal gangs know Ireland is a soft target. Until a few years ago, most credit card receipts in the Republic printed the full credit card number. Personal computer security is a joke since many people don't know the first thing about how to block access to their information. Some businesses are also lazy about securing customer information from prying eyes.
When you think about it, recycling has been an absolute godsend to those in search of personal details. Today, there is no need for petty criminals to sift through rotten eggs, cereal and spoiled meat for their goal. Simply open the lid to the green bin and have a good look for bills, receipts and scribbled passwords.
You could make €100, or more for every name you deliver to the person running the operation.
Call me a paranoid suburbanite, but today I bought a personal shredder.
I realise, of course, that I may be doing the bin woman a great disservice. She may have nobler reasons to "dumpster dive". Apparently, rubbish is all the rage these days. Picking through litter has been refashioned as "freeganism".
Freegans rescue food and discarded, but still usable, items as a political statement against consumer society. This merry, but probably quite smelly, group choose to limit their use of resources while opposing materialism, competition, moral apathy and greed. They are welcome to browse my bins but I'd like a smoke signal about it first, okay?
Our bin visitor may also be an artist or an intellectual. Infamously, Damien Hirst embalmed a 14-ft tiger shark, called it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and sold it as art. Currently, an American artist called Justin Gignac takes rubbish from New York City's streets, seals them in plastic cubes, then dates and numbers them. He seems to make a decent living.
The recycling of used items has also fed the minds of the world's great inventors. Thomas Edison said: "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
Next time that woman comes by, I might just ask her in for a cuppa to see what she's creating - chaos or curiosity?
Margaret E. Ward is a journalist specialising in personal finance and consumer issues. She is also a director of Clear Ink, the Clear English Specialists.
