Let's Eat Paste

Note: The particular truck I rode was not actually built from Lego blocks.

So I reached the end of my first day of work, at about 3pm. I had gotten to work that day at 12:30pm, only noone else showed up until 1pm because they were all on lunch break. So I worked for 2 hours that day, and then I discovered the good news. When you work for city sanitation, you get paid for 8 hour days whether you work 8 hours or not. If you finish the route early, you get to go home. There's no need for me to explain why this was so awesome.

So the next day I arrived at about 7:30am and we're all standing around talking amongst ourselves. Trash talking, literally. One guy told about this lady who had recently complained because they didn't put the recycling bin back on her porch when they emptied it. He said in a low-whispery-shifty-eyed-garbageman kind of voice, kind of like he was making sure noone was eavesdropping, "You know, I know it wouldn't be good for business. But some days I'd just like to tell that lady to take that bin and stick it square up her a#@." This was met with much laughter and approval from the others. It's funny because it's true.

Later on that morning, we were back at the transfer station to empty the truck before we finished our route. One guy stormed into the little office extremely upset. Apparently, he had just noticed that some sunnuvab%#$ had taken a grease gun and run a GD MF'ing bead of grease down one side of his sweet 70's Corvette with a paint job that cost three F'ing grand. So he informed us that if one of us didn't come clean, he was going to start taking a baseball bat (which he was holding in his hand) to every car in the parking lot until one of us confessed. It was a very tense and dramatic moment, like sands through the hourglass. Noone confessed, and the only thing that kept him from bashing windows was that someone may have done it at his house and he hadn't noticed because it was on the passenger side.

Five minutes later, I rode with him in the truck. He was sorry I had to see that.

On my third and last day, it was a short day on the route, so I finished up by helping out in the recycling center. My job was literally just to unscrew the caps off of pop bottles and throw them in a separate bin. They're different kinds of plastic, you see, so they're recycled differently. I did that for about two hours and, because of the unnoticed prizes under bottle caps, I got four or five free 20oz sodas out of the deal. I was instructed to throw all the Pepsi product bottles into a different bin, to be sorted later by the guy running the recycling center. He was collecting Pepsi points. He had earned two jean jackets, three beach towels, five t-shirts, two sweatshirts, six hats, and a number of other Pepsi prizes. That guy must live like some kind of king.

So as you can see, this was clearly the best job I ever had, or will ever have.

There was a downside. At a trailer park in town, for some reason they seem to put out their trash way way in advance of trash day, so it's been sitting there in the Arkansas summer heat for days. Much of it is food trash, too, so it smells a bit. This wasn't as awful as it sounds. The awful part was when we tossed one bag into the truck which we found out contained a half-full gallon jug of milk that had been fermenting in the sun. When the crusher deal on the truck comes down to push the trash back, it pressurized the milk jug and it squirted everywhere. I got a little bit on my shirt and jeans, and it nearly made me vomit. My partner however was not so lucky, as he was pretty muched dowsed by it, some right in the face. To my surprise he did not vomit, but he made that motion like he was on the verge. I lost a little bit of my innocence that day.

I only add this so nobody mistakenly jumps into a career as a garbageman expecting no downsides, based on my blog.