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.
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| 2 cubic yard garbage container (aka dumpster) with small roll cart and regular garbage can in front |
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| Pick-up next to Garbage Truck |
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| Mini Garbage Truck |
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| Drop Box or Roll Off Truck |
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