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.