The Slice: Scattering after the scat, er, fact

What would you have done?

Saturday morning, I was inside by some windows that look out on a sidewalk near the side of our house, which is on a corner lot. I heard voices and glanced through the blinds.

Two women I don’t know stood with a dog where the sidewalk crosses my driveway. It might have been a mother and teenage daughter.

The younger of the two briskly walked up the driveway and disappeared from view. I wondered if she was coming to our back door. But in a moment, she rejoined the other woman and the dog and they continued on.

Seconds later, I figured it out. They must have seen our garbage barrels back by the small patio and had taken the liberty of dumping dog waste in one of them.

Almost knocking my wife down on my way out the back door, I hurried outside and confirmed my theory. There in my trash barrel was a knotted plastic bag of you know what.

Striding purposefully out to the sidewalk, I looked down the street. But they were gone. They must have turned at the very next corner.

In an instant, I arrived at the following conclusions:

1. Had I pursued them and handed back the bag of doo, they would have thought I was a crazy old nutjob.

2. In their minds, they had done the right thing by bagging up the droppings. They almost certainly would have been baffled by my trash-barrel protectionism. (Though I doubt they would have done what they did if I had been outside when they went by.)

3. My asking that they carry the droppings home with them would have sounded unreasonable to them.

4. It was too cool last Saturday to plausibly make a case that the smell of baked-in-barrel droppings would be a quality-of-life issue.

5. When you’re in your 20s and think life is going to be all about music and movies and travel, you don’t have the whole picture.

Today’s Slice question: If people still referred to phone numbers by “exchange” names such as Hudson or Walnut, what options would you have, given your keypad configuration and the first two digits of your number?

(My number is 459-5470. So my exchange name could be Illegal or Illogical. But since that number is seven digits and not six like they used to be, I’d have to say “Illegible-9, 5470” or perhaps “GJ9-5470.”)