"When the bin is full, it needs emptying!!!"

This interesting sentence is posted in the kitchen of my flat, near the bin (Americans, read "trash can" for "bin"). There are so many interesting things about it, from the notion of the bin having needs to the multiple excalamation points. Since the sign seems like a sort of command directed at me, I can't help but try to divine the sign's own needs.

What is this sentence doing? It seems to equate two things which are necessarily equal. It's a truism, isn't it? No one would say that when the bin is full, it needs some more packing! Possibly "needs emptying" is just a euphemism for "is full." Is the sign in fact doing anything at all?

Under some consideration, one realizes that the sentence is in fact a reminder of something we already know. Though everyone would agree that what's needed by a full bin is emmptying, a newcomer might need to be told that his flatmates *care* about this fact and will be upset to see a full bin which has not been emptied. It signals the fact that no one person has been given responsibility over the bin--it's impersonality indicates that the need of emptying the bin is shared by all.

But, how often are newcomers coming new to the flat? Surely guests don't need to take responsibility for the bin. Isn't it a bit unseemly to let them see this prominent reminder? It's a bit like saying, "After you've enjoyed this lovely dinner, I'll have the burdensome task of wiping away the crumbs you've left, meticulously scrubbing the dishes, and hauling the sticky trash down to the dump." No, the sign can hardly be for newcomers or for guests.

What is it, then? Why is it there, and what difference does it make? With enough cultural context--that being the context of Western capitalist twenty-somethings sharing a flat--it finally becomes easy to read out the meaning. "When the bin is full, it needs emptying," is the exasparated cry of the neatnik who simply *can't believe* that he is always the one to take out a seemingly overfull trashcan. The neatnik is crying, of course, to the laissez-faire in his midst, who can't see anything wrong with dropping one more orange peel in the bin. If the neatnik caught the beatnik at that very moment, the latter would only cry--"It's not full! I'll take it out later."

What these signs never specify, to the chagrin of semanticists, is what level of junk should qualify as a "full bin." Shouldn't this, after all, be your first question when you notice that your fellow communitarians are not doing what seems should obviously be done. Whoever penned the above text was surely aware that he or she was reiterating something obvious--the author knew it was only a reminder. So why didn't this merry barrister stop to think what open questions might be the source of the confusion?

When people aren't behaving as you'd like, the reason is almost never that the others are stupid or flouting your needs; far more often than not, the source of conflict is a difference of interpretation.