Solid Waste

I had a job interview this morning, which made me think of jobs that I've had in the past. When I was in high school and college, I always worked in the summers. I usually ended up in some type of food service, like Dairy Queen.

However, one summer I applied to work for the city solid waste department in the town where my parents lived. You might be wondering what solid waste entails. Well, I was afraid it might be the sewer treatment plant. Gross, right? But I found out a girl named Wendy, who I had shared a trigonometry class with in high school, had had the job the previous summer. She conveniently attended college at the same school as I did, so I tracked her down and pumped her for details. She said that basically, you just worked with the garbage collector guys. She added that she had gone out on the trucks and actually picked up people's garbage cans. She said it was kind of fun and she thought I could do it.

So, with that nugget of information, I went ahead and filled out the application for a summer hire position. Within a couple weeks, I found out that I got an interview! I was so excited! The interview turned out be a bit intimidating. There was a panel of four men that currently worked for the city. They took turns asking me about my work habits and job experience and other normal stuff. Then they asked me if I thought I could lift 50 pounds repetitively for 8 hours a day! I lied and said yes and added that I was working out and could work on lifting weights. (I was actually pretty fit then, but I didn't really think I could lift that much over such a long period of time.)

A week or so passed, and then I got a call that I had gotten the job! I was told that I needed steel toed boots and to wear old jeans and a t-shirt that I didn't mind getting dirty. So I trucked off to Kmart with my mom and went to the workwear department to try on steel toed boots.

I was the only girl of the summer hires in the Solid Waste department. There were a few girls in Streets and Water, but all they did was paint lines on the streets and other easy stuff. Almost all the full timers were guys, except for one lady whose job it was to water the plants at the parks and things like that.

There were different pick-up routes that Solid Waste was responsible for. There were the residential garbage pick-up routes, the commercial garbage routes, the recylce routes, the grass pick-up route (for yard waste and grass clippings), and the cardboard routes. I ended up doing them all at one point or another.

The routes that I usually did were the reclycle routes. It was still hard work, but the recycle bins were lighter than the garbage cans. A full time person would drive the truck (you have to have a CDL license, and so none of the summer hires were allowed to drive the trucks) and there would be two summer hires that jumped out of the recylce truck to pick up the bins and sort the reclyclables.

I did the Monday garbage route sometimes, because it was lighter. I worked my ass off anyway, but I still didn't have the upper body strength that the guys did.

The grossest, yet most fascinating route was the commercial garbage route. We went around and emptied dumpsters at apartments, restaurants and other businesses. I got to hook up the dumpsters and work the hydraulics on the truck to dump the garbage into the truck. Then I lowered the dumpster down and cranked the lever to make the smasher on the truck came down and compacted the garbage back into the truck.

Most of the garbage on the commercial route was like any other garbage - stinky. However, there was a particular deli that threw out old meat and other rotten food. Their dumpster was the nastiest of all. One day, I was tipping the dumpster back and all the old fetid meat and half eaten sandwiches slid down into the mouth of the garbage truck. At the bottom of the dumpster was a pulsating mass of white maggots. They squirmed and slid down the side of the dumpster and into the truck. Jake, one of the full timers, said, "Don't get juiced when you compact that down!" Just then, slimy, bloody water squirted out the sides of the truck as I pulled the crank for the compactor. The whole encounter was disgusting, but interesting, because I had never seen a real maggot before.

My two favorite things about the job were getting to ride on the back of the truck on the little step and riding to the dump with Bill. Riding on the back of the truck was what I imagine wind sailing to be like. The truck has a rail that you can hold onto and you stand on the step. The truck is only supposed to be going about 10 miles per hour, but Bill would drive it up to 35 miles per hour, which feels pretty fast when you're outside the truck. Bill would also take summer hires to the dump. We weren't supposed to do that, but he let us come along sometimes anyway. The dump was outside of town, so it took a good hour to go there, dump your garbage and then head back to the "shop".

I've always loved going to the dump. My Dad used to take us to the dump to toss away old wall to wall carpet that he'd ripped out or old mattresses or whatever crap we were throwing away at the time. The dumps of my childhood were more open landfills where you back up your truck and just chuck stuff out, but the dump where we dropped off the garbage from the garbage truck had a station where you empty the truck and then it somehow gets transported to the landfill. Either way, it was fun, because Bill always had some funny Bill catch phrase, like "You ain't Dutch, you ain't much", or "It's beer thirty", when it was 3:30pm and our quittin' time.
He was nice and not condescending to me like some of the other full timers. I think I was the token girl employee, but Bill didn't seem to care. He reminded me of a big garden gnome and always seemed happy.

Some other interesting things about the job were that we all ate lunch at the same time in the lunch room. All the guys brought their lunches in coolers and we played hearts while we ate. The other thing people liked to do at lunch was to go in the parking lot and look at Tim's Camaro. It was an older Camaro (yes, it was bitchin') and he had the engine all tricked out with fancy chrome parts.

I really liked working at the garbage job, but it grew a bit tedious by the end of the summer. I was glad to be done and go back to college. The garbage dump and the maggots were novel, but only for the summer.

And no, the job that I applied for today didn't involve solid waste...not that I know of anyway.