Last weekend, my husband and I planted some flowers in the front of our house, spread a little mulch, and did some sprucing up. (What? You expected anything less from a couple of suburban dorks?) We pulled our truck up to the front of the house and were about to make our first trip to the front beds when my husband yelled, “Watch out for the dog poop!” There was a dinner-roll sized poop right in the path that we would have walked if we had been pompous enough to think that we could walk around on our own property without looking down the whole time. Then it rained, so now it’s a dinner-plate-shaped poop. Dog poop isn’t the biggest problem we have in my neighborhood. (According to our homeowners association officers, our biggest problems are that there was a break-in a few months ago and SpringFest! may not have a bounce house this year.) But it’s becoming the biggest problem for me in my neighborhood. There’s a lot of abandoned dog poop around here. Not just in my yard, but in front of the little gym, and where I cross the street to get to the mail room. Someone is not picking up their dog poop. I’m dying to know who it is. I can’t imagine any neighborhood reputation worse than being The Guy Who Doesn’t Pick Up Dog Poop. Worse than The Guy Who Parks on the Street Like a Drunk and The Guy Who Doesn’t Take His Garbage Cans In for Two Days, Dog Poop Guy doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Plus he’s really, really lazy. He lives in my neighborhood and I want to know who it is. Last year, people around here were in an uproar when a nearby neighborhood announced that they were going to deal with their dog poop problem by requiring that all dog owners submit a doggie DNA sample. It would be kept on file and then when they found dog poop, they would collect a sample, test it, see whose poop it was, and start handing out fines. 1984! Big Brother! Too much government control! Forensic testing dog poop is creepy! Whose job is that - Ew! everyone typed. I thought it was brilliant. There’s no way anybody would be testing any dog poop. Just the threat, just the idea that you might get caught at being The Dog Poop Guy would be enough to scare people into knocking the disgusting habit the heck off. Not so much Big Brother as Clever Brother. Or maybe Clever Sister. My neighborhood is unlikely to institute such a rule. (There was that break-in and we’ve got the whole bounce-house crisis to deal with.) So I’ve decided to go all Olivia Benson and do a surveillance. You know how much I avoid confrontation and hate directly addressing problems. But I’m ticked enough to park myself in front of my window for 24 hours and wait. I have some knitting to finish up and I’m hand-quilting a big project, so I could just plant myself right there at the front window and watch for dog walkers. I could think of some worse ways to spend a day. Not a lot, but some. As for what I’m going to do and say yell when I catch someone, I’m open to suggestions. Please don’t recommend anything that involves me actually picking up the dog poop. We’ve already established that I’d step around it for days rather than pick up someone else’s dog’s poop. I’m not that angry.
