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.