Every fairy tale has a villain.
In our condominium, it's not a dragon.
It's the residents' WhatsApp group.
When we moved here, I naively imagined peaceful coastal living, children riding bicycles and neighbours exchanging friendly greetings.
What I hadn't anticipated was the level of surveillance.
Living in a condominium means you're never truly alone.
Not in a sinister government-monitoring-your-phone kind of way.
More in a "someone has noticed your recycling habits" kind of way.
Every week, an email arrives detailing the latest emergency.
"Dog poop discovered near the olive tree."
"Vehicle parked approximately twelve centimetres outside designated boundaries."
"Unidentified resident failed to flatten cardboard box."
The tension is palpable.
There is even one neighbour who records barking dogs and sends the audio files to management.
Not a written complaint.
Actual recordings.
At this point, I feel they deserve some sort of honorary detective badge.
The garden regulations are equally impressive.
Residents are only allowed to plant condominium-approved vegetation.
One particularly ambitious neighbour attempted to create a little privacy by growing additional hedges.
The rebellion was swiftly crushed.
The hedges were ordered removed.
Apparently privacy is not an approved landscaping feature.
As things currently stand, most of us remain visible to our neighbours from every conceivable angle.
If you are drinking coffee on your terrace, there is a reasonable chance somebody else is watching you drink coffee on your terrace.
Whether they want to or not.
But nothing — and I mean nothing — compares to the rubbish situation.
For reasons I still don't fully understand, rubbish trucks are not permitted inside the condominium.
This means every resident must personally escort their rubbish to the communal bins outside the gates.
Some drive.
Some walk.
Everyone eventually develops a surprisingly intimate relationship with their garbage.
And that is where the real drama begins.
Because the bins have become the social battleground of the entire community.
Certain residents possess a fascinating habit of placing cardboard boxes next to the bins instead of inside them.
This small act of rebellion triggers one particular neighbour into a state of nightly outrage.
Like clockwork, she emerges from her house, retrieves the offending cardboard and throws it back through the condominium fence in protest.
A one-woman waste-management vigilante.
But the story doesn't end there.
Another resident — whom I have privately named Sherlock Holmes of Sanitation — then appears on the scene.
He carefully photographs the evidence.
Studies the labels.
Examines the packaging.
And posts his findings in the community chat like a detective unveiling the culprit in a murder mystery.
The only difference is that the crime involves an Amazon box and poor recycling etiquette.
At this point, I no longer follow the storyline closely enough to know who is winning.
All I know is that the cardboard continues to appear.
The vigilante continues to retaliate.
And Sherlock Holmes remains committed to solving the case.
Some people watch Netflix.
I live inside it.
"Some people watch Netflix. I live inside it."
— Kasia
Kasia Plattner is a writer, relocator and professional starter-over. Author of The Art of Making Life More Complicated.