If there’s anything that can turn me into an uptight, curtain-twitching, passive-aggressive note-leaving neighbor from hell, it’s our recycling box.

It’s like this: Everyone in our building has their own recycling box. We keep the boxes in our respective flats until Thursday night, when we put them out on the sidewalk for collection the next day. The recycling men go up the street on Friday morning, emptying the recyclables into their truck and returning the boxes to the sidewalk in front of the building. Then, over the course of the day, everyone in the building picks up their box and brings it back inside for another week.

Except…when they don’t. Occasionally the recycling men fail to put the boxes back where they came from, so boxes from our building will wind up across the street and we have to go hunting for them. But sometimes, just sometimes…someone takes a box which isn’t theirs.

You see, not all recycling boxes are created equal. When the city first started the recycling program, I think the boxes were all the same, but now there are bigger ones and smaller ones, black ones and clear ones, ones with plastic lids (which blow away very easily) and more practical ones with nets you stretch over the top. We currently have a black box which is badly cracked in one corner and which has a net (the beneficial net makes up for the crack).

In addition to this, we have a spare plastic lid in our flat left over from our previous box, which somebody STOLE. This was irritating not just because it’s really lame to take something that’s not yours, but because trying to get another box from the city council can be a real pain. Technically, you’re supposed to be able to order a new box online. But even when the online form works, it takes ages for the new box to show up—assuming it ever does show up and assuming someone doesn’t take that one, too, before you can get to it and bring it inside yourself.

So, we’ve had our easily identifiable cracked plastic box with the net for a good year or two. Several months ago, however, we put it out on collection night and when we went to get it the next morning, it wasn’t there. I searched for it all up and down the street but eventually gave up and, cursing everyone in the neighborhood, I went back inside and resentfully ordered another box online.

The new box didn’t show up the next week or the week after that, but the week after that I came home on Thursday evening to find our box sitting outside our building with someone else’s recycling in it. I know, right? Our unique, cracked, be-netted plastic box which we’d been using for ages had been brazenly co-opted by someone else and used with impunity—like they were mocking us with our own box.

I seriously contemplated dumping all of the stranger’s recycling on the sidewalk and filling the box with our own recycling but decided that was a step too far, even for me. Instead, the next morning I jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn, bolted down the stairs as soon as the recycling men had gone, hauled our box back upstairs, wiped it down, and painted our flat number GIGANTICALLY on every single side of it. And that was the end of that.

Until tonight, when Jeremy and I arrived home after dark to find two empty recycling boxes outside the building, neither of which was ours.

Oh, the cursing as Jeremy went off to check some boxes further up the street while I investigated boxes stacked in other people’s front gardens. Oh, the fuming when I couldn’t find our box and Jeremy came back down the street empty-handed too. Oh, the disgust at humanity which welled inside me as we stomped up the stairs and I began mentally composing another passive-aggressive note to be pinned up in the hallway for our thieving neighbors—something along the lines of “Could whoever ‘accidentally’ took our recycling box AGAIN return it immediately…”

And oh, the chagrin when Jeremy suddenly stopped with a laugh and said, “Wait a second, we didn’t even put our box out last night…”