Trucks and Pick-ups (Get to know the garbage man lingo)

Dairy of a Garbage Man – Trucks and Pick-ups

Every job has it’s own special vocabulary that you have to learn. This is true with regions of the country, towns, and even families and friends have their own secret language that only the insiders know. If you are talking to someone that works at the power company and you call a telephone pole a telephone pole they quickly correct you and say “it’s a power pole, we just let the telephone company use our pole.” We have words like drop boxes, roll carts, dumpsters, containers, and cans. These all describe something specific and hopefully everyone at our company knows what item matches what term. We also hope that these terms will match up with what our customers want. In the age we live in pictures and the internet help with communication, but there are still times when confusion happens and we show up with a giant drop box at someone's house and all they wanted was a tiny garbage can.

This situation doesn't happen a lot but it does sometimes. One time miss communication happened is when a guy said he had a truck load of trash that he needed picked up. When talking on the phone to an average customer I would take the term truck to mean a Chevy, Ford, or Dodge truck that someone drives back and forth to work and is regular sized. This gentleman however was a truck driver, as in dump truck driver. When I arrived and saw the mountain of trash I explained that this was much more garbage then I anticipated and I would need to bring something bigger to haul it in. He was furious and wondered how I could be so stupid to think that a truck was a pick-up. In his world the term truck means big dump truck or log truck or tanker truck. When you talk about a little car sized truck you are supposed to say pick-up truck. I didn't argue and considered it a lesson learned about proper communication.

Most of the time the best thing to do is use specific terms as related to measurements of size. We use terms like cubic yards, how many gallons a can is, and how many feet high, long, and wide something is. These terms are usually pretty universal. We also deal in terms of weight. How many pounds something is or tons. This assumes that everyone knows that a ton is equal to 2000 pounds. To some people a ton is a mystically large amount of trash. When they say “I have a ton of garbage” it can mean pretty much anything. The average person in the united states throws away about 4.5 pounds of trash a day. This means in a year they throw away about 1600 pounds of trash. Almost a ton! In the place we live Tillamook the average person threw away 1704 pounds of trash away in the year 2012. Add this to the amount they recycled of 839 pounds per person in 2012 and everyone literally has over a ton of waste in a year. If you kept all that trash stored up at your house it would fill up the average sized bedroom. And if you have more then one person living in your house each of them could fill a room with trash. If you have a family of four you make 5 tons of trash in a year. Enough to fill up a small garbage truck all on your own. If you combined your trash with your neighbors you could fill a regular sized garbage truck that you see driving through town. Hopefully these descriptions give you a good idea what the lingo in the garbage world is.

2 cubic yard garbage container (aka dumpster)  with small roll cart and regular garbage can in front 

Pick-up next to Garbage Truck

Mini Garbage Truck

Drop Box or Roll Off Truck

Co-Workers

My dog pooping in my neighbors yard.  Yes they took a picture to prove it and Yes I still denied he did it because I don't see any poop in the picture.

Diary of a Garbage Man – Co-Workers

Co-workers are kind of like neighbors. If you have really good co-workers they can make any job fun and rewarding, just like if you live in a crappy house but it’s in a great neighborhood you might be hesitant to move. This also works in reverse. If you have an awesome house but hate your neighbors you might want to move, just to get away from them, so their dog stops pooping in your yard, they quit borrowing things and not bringing them back, and they leave you alone and stop asking you over to play Pictionary. When you love your job you can usually put up with a bad co-worker here and there in hopes that they will quit or get fired one day. I love my job so I have been able to survive through some bad co-workers. These are their stories.

This is the best story I have ever heard about why someone couldn’t make it to work. The phone rings at 4 am. I answer and the idiot on the other end of the line says he can’t make it in to work. I ask “how come?” He says “I was getting out of bed and stepped on a belt buckle and now I can’t walk.” That seemed pretty legit at 4 am, so I get up and do his route. Later on that day I call to check on him and see if he is ok. No answer. He must of somehow managed to walk out of the house if he can’t answer the phone I think to myself, but talk myself into thinking he must just be hurt so bad he can’t get up to get the phone. Later that night I go to play basketball at an open gym and there he is running up and down the court. I have no doubt he stepped on his belt buckle that morning and suddenly had the best excuse ever to miss work. Then he got busted, just like on an episode of Cheaters and when I confronted him he played dumb.

When you’re training someone to do your job the #1 attitude you don’t want the trainee to have is that he already knows how to do the job better then you in the first 5 minutes. Every day when I get to work I have a route list that tells me all the places I have to go in an order that I have come up with to maximize efficiency and safety. One morning I am supposed to train a new guy to do my route. He shows up at 4 am and when I explain to him that this is our list of stops and where we will be going he interrupts me and says “I’m going out to my car to get my GPS.” You have to realize this is back 10 or 15 years ago in the late 90's so it wasn’t like having Siri on your iPhone. A GPS had a screen about two inches by two inches and all that it showed was a little black line and if you entered a way point there would be a triangle on the screen that you tried to get that line to run into. If you have ever used a GPS like this you would know that after moving around very much in a small area the screen is just a jumble of lines that looks like an etch a sketch after a two year old has played with it all morning. I told him that it would be easier if he just tried to pay attention to my instructions and use his memory and the list of customers to find all the stops, but he would have none of that. He paid $300 for this GPS and by dammed he was going to use it and not his brain. So we took off on our route with him setting way point after way point at every house. At the end of the day he had 300 little triangles on a 2 x 2 screen and had no clue where he had just been. After that he still tried to use it the next day. Some people are very thick headed. If I had it to do over again I just would have said thanks for coming in but you can go home now before we even started my route.

I have to fess up I have been a bad co-worker before. The meanest thing I have done is con someone into drinking sour milk. I really didn’t like this particular co-worker; we will call him Mr. GPS, because he had a hard time listening to anyone. I decided to play a prank on him one day. I stopped at the store before work one day and got a pint of chocolate milk. There was a particular stop that always had out of date milk in the garbage. When we got to this stop I threw the fresh milk in the trash with the out of date sour milk when Mr. GPS wasn’t looking. Then I pulled it back out after he dumped the container. It happened to be a hot summer day and my milk was still ice cold so I could tell I had the right one. I told him he should try one of the garbage milks. I said “they are perfectly fine just past the pull date.” I knew he would take the bait because it was hot and he was sweating like a sinner in church. He grabbed a milk and instead of giving it a smell test before he tried it and getting grossed out by the sour milk smell, like I expected, he just started guzzling it down chunks and all. After a few second it hit him that the milk was rancid and he started puking all over and had milk coming out his nose. I really didn’t feel that bad for him and felt like that was a good pay back for all he had put me through. 

Old Man Fall

Old Man Fall

On Monday December 23rd  I was doing my regular garbage route. At around 5:30 am I turned onto Williams avenue from Alder lane.  When I came around the corner I noticed a shape that looked like a person laying motionless on the sidewalk.  I stopped the truck in front of the house to get the garbage in the back yard.  It was dark and had been raining all morning and was brisk, maybe around 40 degrees outside.  When I walked up to what seemed like a person there was no movement and I heard no sounds other then my idling truck.
When I walked up to the body piled up on the ground there was no movement and no sound except for my truck and the patter of rain drops.  I knelt down and looked over what turned out to be a little old man. I put my ear down right next to his head and I could tell he was trying to yell for help but his voice had gone horse. No sound was coming out just gasps of air.  I asked if he was ok.  This was a pretty dumb question but what else are you supposed to ask someone who is clearly hurt?  He managed to get out a weak "help me up."  He said "I fell help me up"  I tried to look him over but it was dark and I couldn't see anything.  I asked if he wanted me to call for help.  He just said in a weak cracked voice "help me up."  I thought about it for a second and didn't know what I should do.  I knew if he was really hurt I could make it worse by helping him.  He was soaking wet and he had a newspaper gripped in his right hand that was saturated with water and just a ball of pulp.  I figured he must have been laying there for at least ten or fifteen minutes for it to have gotten that soaked in the rain.  I rolled him onto his hands and knees and then got underneath his left arm with my head and tried to lift up, but he was just dead weight and much shorter than me. I didn't have a lot of power to stand up with my head under his arms lower then my waist.  I got closer to him and put his left arm around my waist and then grabbed under his right arm pit and lifted him up onto his feet.  He wouldn't help hold onto me with his right hand because he was still holding the paper.  I asked him to drop the paper and hold onto me but he said "no I came out do get my paper and I need it."  I told him I would get it for him after I got him into the house if he just set it down.  He hesitated but I was already pulling it out of his hand and he eventually let it go.  We walked a few steps and he said "I can walk myself let go."  I started to let go out of reflex when he asked but as soon as I started to loosen my grip he began to fall like a sack of potatoes.  I got a firm hold on him again and dragged him to the steps.  We walked up a step and then I could see the door had a screen on it and it needed to be opened out.  I managed to hold on to him and pull the screen open with my left hand half way and then switch hands quickly holding him and open it the rest of the way with my right hand.  I tried to lean him against me and hold the screen in my right hand and open the door in with my left but it just wasn't working to do all three things at once.  I managed to push the door in while he balanced for a second on his own.  Then I was able to see his face and hands in the porch light.  He had blood running down his face and all over his hands.  It looked like his glasses had crushed into the bridge of his nose and opened up an inch long cut.  His hands looked like they had several scrapes and a cut that were bleeding from his knuckles and palms.  I didn't see any other options but to get him in the house.  Luckily when we got into the house there was a couch just inside the door, so I set him down on it.  He started to call out for his wife and after a few seconds she came into the living room from a hallway.  She was in a long heavy full covering cotton night gown, but when she rounded the corner she stopped and gasped because a stranger was in the house and had seen her.  She went back the way she came and then returned with an even thicker, larger, longer robe.  I'm sure her modesty was instinctual but not necessary.  When she came back in the room she gave me a look like what the heck did you do?  We all just looked at each other.  Fortunately the old man sputtered out "he helped me" "he helped me."  She then changed her look and came closer to us and started to check if he was ok.  I said he had fallen down out on the sidewalk but I didn't know how long he had been laying there.  She said "he has Alzheimer and gets confused, he was just going out to get the paper."  I remembered the paper and went back to fetch it for him even though I thought it would be futile to try and read it.

 After talking about it and thinking back I'm quite sure that the lady thought I had run over her husband with my truck or something like that.  Her look was not at all what I expected when she first saw her bloody husband.  I feel lucky that he must have been ok but I was very caught off guard and really had no idea how to handle myself or what the right thing or best thing to do was for the old man.  I knew he needed help and I wanted to help him, that is really all I knew.  The thing that stuck out the most to me was how much the old man wanted and believed he just needed a little bit of help and then he was going to be fine.  I don't think that he realized that he could have been laying there for an hour or two before anyone saw him.  Being in fatal danger is something that we can find ourselves in at any time or place.  I also noticed his instinctual need to just get up.  It is a primal need that when we fall we want to get back up as soon as possible to avoid getting eaten or trampled or left behind by the pack.  It must have been a very helpless feeling to be laying there in the wet, cold, and dark.  It amazed me that he still cared so much about getting his paper, but I can understand that goal or mission orientation.  To do whatever it takes to complete the mission.  Maybe he used to be in the military.
I thought that I was mentally prepared for an occasion like this.  I have been helping take care of my grandmother in-law over the last couple of weeks and fully expected that when I looked in on her I would find her hurt, fallen, or worse when I showed up to fill her wood box.  I had rehearsed what I would do.  Check her to see if she was breathing and coherent.  Call my wife.  Call an ambulance.  Soother her.  This all seemed like things that I could do.  After I got back in my garbage truck and continued on my route I was shaking physically and mentally.  My mind went forward in time and pictured who would be there to help me when I fall?  How would I act? Would I be grateful or just want to get up and keep moving?  It made me think about how much time I have left before I can't get up.  It wasn't until a few years ago that I even felt like I got weaker as the days went by.  When your young and growing and up to your mid thirties everything feels possible.  You have boundless energy and your body is always able to recover and feel stronger then it was the day before.  And your always pushing hard to get farther faster.  It is like ridding a bike up a hill.  When your young you push hard and peddle fast to get to the top of the hill of life.  When you reach your middle ages you hit that top of the mountain and ride level for a bit.  Your mind and body are moving at the same speed and you peddle the amount you need to move the speed you want.  It's smooth.  Then you start to get older and it's like riding the bike down a hill.  You can peddle but that just leads to moving too fast for your legs to keep up with and you have to use the brakes.  Time and experiences start to fly by faster then you want them to and most people don't even realize that they aren't in control anymore, gravity is.  You can only slow the bike down and hope to take in as much as you can.  Eventually you will get to the bottom of the hill and have no hope of riding the bike back up.  Your legs just wont pull you up the hill without help.  Most people resent that they need help and start to get bitter and angry. They do crazy things to prove that they don't need help.  They say things like I have the body of a teenager and I can do anything a 20 year old can do.  These little lies sound good but aren't true and only make you look foolish and deluded.  Getting old gracefully seems to be something very hard to do.  I don't expect that I will do well at it but I know I want to try.  As I thought of all this on my garbage route after helping the old man up my eyes filled with tears. I wept at the thought of myself and everyone I know coming to a place where they could no longer get up.  I just hope when you or I need help up it can be something the helper and helped can learn from and share in a positive way.  And overall I'm just glad that I was there to help and hope that I can help others as much as I can everyday.

Adult Accidents

Dairy of a Garbage Man – Adult Accidents

One of the scariest news stories that I ever saw was when a mail man got fired and arrested for going to the bathroom in someones bushes. I didn't hear the entire news story just that headline. I thought to myself I'm going to jail. I pee in peoples yards and driveways every day. When I'm out on my garbage route for six or eight hours at a time it isn't very convenient to always find a public restroom or other indoor place to relive yourself. When you do the same route all the time it is pretty easy to find secluded places that you can go. There is still an element of danger that a random jogger could come buy or kids could be playing out in the forest but for the most part it works out. When your driving to random places or just filling in for someone it's harder to identify these places and be safe. Sometimes this along with questionable dietary choices leads to accidents.

My worst and most epic adult accident story starts on a pleasant summers day. I'm writing this story in the first person to protect the identity of the individual who told me their story. I was driving up and down the coast on highway 101 delivering drop boxes. I happened to get a gift early in the week from a customer that was an entire sleeve of pepperoni sticks. I would guess about five pounds or so of pepperoni. I got hungry so I started eating pepperoni and before I knew it I had eaten about ten sticks. This made me thirsty so I stopped at a convenience store and got a super tanker size cup of soda to wash it down with. With my big gulp of soda I mixed in a few more pepperoni sticks. I'm not sure if it was the combination of Pepsi and pepperoni sticks or if the meat had gone bad from sitting in my truck for too long but soon after my soda was gone my stomach started to make all types of unholy sounds. The gurgles and growls intensified as I traveled north away from my home toilet bowl. The sounds continued and the slur of meat snack and soda swiftly traveled into my intestines.

I could tell early on that this was going to be an unpleasant evacuation from my system. I knew I didn't have much time but I also didn't have any place close by that I could stop and relieve myself. My mind was racing and I was triangulating positions and going through my mental Rolodex of who I knew or worked in the area that I could trust enough to allow me to destroy their bathroom. I couldn't come up with anything. I was alone and on the road and the road was no place to be. I couldn't hold it in any longer and it happened. All I could do was sit up a little bit in my seat so that I didn't have to wallow in my own filth. After a few minutes I pulled into a state park and b lined it for the restroom. When I entered the restroom I felt relieved but soon realized I didn't need a restroom any more what I really needed was a shower and clean clothes. I went into the stall and accessed the damage. My underwear looked like a Japanese flag painted in brown instead of red and with a lot more texture. I scrapped things off and cleaned myself the best I could. Then I got dressed minus my brown Japanese flag underwear. I took those to the sink and started scrubbing. I had been alone in the bathroom up to this point but then someone came in. I tried to hide what I was doing because it was obviously embarrassing and gross. I shoulder shrugged and half turned as best I could as the other guy moved in and out of the bathroom. Luckily there were two sinks. When the fruit of the looms were as clean as I could get them I went back to the truck and as I drove back down the highway I held my underwear out the window so they would dry. Much like one of the little sports flags that people set out on their window to show they are a Beaver or Duck fan while driving down I-5 to a game. It looked like I was rooting for the Browns that day.

This type of thing happens at some point to every truck or route driver I would guess. Most people choose to keep these stories to themselves but I hope by sharing this story that if you see someone relieving themselves along side the road or in the bushes you choose to feel empathy for them and NOT call the police. I'm sure if that had any choice they would find a restroom and they are probably wishing they hadn't eaten all those pepperoni sticks.

Three Types of Customers

Diary of a Garbage Man – Three Types of Customers

In my job there are three types of customers. The first and most common type of customer is the one that just wants to get their trash picked up. They don't care when, where, or how I do this. They just want to put garbage in the can and have it disappear before they run our of room to put more garbage in the can. This system works out well because that is exactly what I want to do. It would be my preference that I never see or hear from my customers. Most of the time I pick up the garbage before they are awake or while they are at work. The can is in the same place every week and I dump it and leave it in the same place. Easy easy lemon squeezy. Most of my problems at work come from the other two types of customers.

The first and most typical problem customers is the one that likes to watch me. The watchers come in two forms. The kind that will walk right out and stand next to me to watch me dump their trash and the kind that will peek out of the blinds or hide in the shadows and watch me. The bold watchers usually looks at what I do and quickly come up with a better way for me to do my job. “You should lift with your legs and not your back” “Wouldn't it be quicker if you parked on the other side of the street” “Can't you come from the other direction” “Why don't you get a different kind of truck” “Can't you make your truck run quieter?” All these stupid questions are unnecessary and a waste of my time to deal with. Most of the time I just feel like saying if you could do better at this why don't you hop on board and show me how it's done. I will sip on a cup of coffee and watch the master at work. These customers tend to call and complain to the boss the most often also. They say things like your garbage man didn't put my can back in the right place, he drives to fast down my driveway, and best of all he didn't get all the trash out of my can. The answer to these complaints is.... your can is on the wrong side of your driveway just to mess with you man, I was driving ten miles per hour instead of five get a life, and there is some garbage still in your can because it was frozen solid at 5 am and wouldn't come out. Now that it is 5 pm and your home from work and it thawed out all day of course it looks like we should have dumped it. Blahhhhhh.

The third type of customer and most rare is the customer that wants me to watch them. These unicorns of the customer world keep me on my toes and insure that weird fetishes are alive and well in the world. These customers are usually ladies and unfortunately always older in age. The tame exhibitionists will do something like turn on the lights in their bedroom as soon as they see my truck pull up and make sure they are in some level of undress and the blinds are open as I approach to get the garbage. Most of the time I can just focus on getting the garbage and overt my eyes and we both get what we want. The customer gets the thrill of thinking someone is watching them and I get to pick up the trash and not be scarred for life. When I drive away the light goes off and all is back to normal in the world. Issues come up when the exhibitionists aren't so tame. The wild show ponies want to make sure they are seen and want to see my reaction. These ladies typically come running out of the house with their bathrobe only half on, in their bra and panties, or just a t-shirt waving a bag of garbage at me asking me to come and get it. I'm sure sometimes this act is completely innocent and you just want your garbage to get taken out, but when it happens every week that seems like you might have a problem. Most of the time I can deal with these interactions in a gentlemanly way and just look to the side or be quick about it. But sometimes when a motion light comes on unexpectedly and I'm faced with what looks like a fried egg nailed to a wall it leaves some mental trauma that is above my pay grade.

Overall I like and enjoy all my customers and respect their individual quarks and can respect them while giving great service.  I also strive to respect their privacy in much the same way a doctor or lawyer would hold personal information in privilege.   I hope these stories can help shed light on what it is like for your garbage man when he picks up your trash each week. 

Intro to Diary of a Garbage Man

Diary of A Garbage Man – Intro

I have been a garbage man all my life. Lots of people, ok a few people, have told me I should write about my job and life because it seems interesting. If your favorite movie of all time is Men at Work you might like my stories. If you like the tv show The Sopranos you might like my stories. If you wonder what happens in town between 2 am and when you wake up you might like my stories. If you think the stuff you see at the dump is cool you will definitely like my stories. If you wonder what happens to your trash after you put it in your can you will like my stories. If you want to know what people really eat and how much they really drink I can tell you. If you wonder if anyone every eats things out of your trash, you will want to read on.

You will not want to read my stories if you dislike rats, maggots, poopy diapers, cat litter, or used feminine hygiene products. By the way ladies we have a sewage system that can handle you flushing those things. We don’t live in Mexico. And if you don’t flush them they should be double or triple wrapped in t.p. and sealed in a zip lock bag before you throw them out. And if that seems excessive just remember that dogs, bears, and other animals have a nose that is 1000’s of times more sensitive than a humans. Think of it like this, if your sense of smell is the size of a postage stamp a dog’s sense of smell is the size of a football field. This means they can smell that old chicken bone through your garbage can and inside the hefty bag. Make sure you have that lid on tight and maybe put a bungee strap over it also.

I have a special set of skills that I have learned from years of picking up trash. I can tell if a garbage can is heavy or light just by looking at it from down the street. I can tell if people are at home or on vacation just by driving past their house. I can tell you when they have a new baby, because they will have twice as much trash as they did before. I can tell you when they are getting ready to send a kid off to college because they throw out toys and books from Dr. Seuss to the driving test manual. I can tell when they are on a new diet and when they had a party. I can also tell when they are remodeling their house. This usually means they are getting ready to sell their house. I don’t understand why most people live in their crappy house for years and then fix it up just to sell it, but people do it all the time.

Mostly I have learned to be a student of human nature through years of observing perfect strangers habits and activities. I don’t know if I have put all this knowledge to very good use but I have tried. I know the companies that made pet rocks, snuggies, and chi-a-pets made a lot of money and all of those things ended up in the trash a few weeks after Christmas. If I’m just patient any material item I have every wanted will end up in the trash and I will get it for free. So just like that gold fish, huge stuffed bear, and etched glass Bon Jovi mirror from the fair I will try and entertain you for a few minutes knowing that even if I’m the must have thing right now eventually I will end up in the round file.