Pure Garbage

"As Jerry Springer said when announcing he was about to have dinner with a loyal viewer, 'It's time to take out the trash.'"

Is there a real Tony Soprano? I'm just asking because my neighbor says he knows him. And I've seen the TV show before and I don't want to get on the bad side of this guy if my neighbor goes mouthing off to him like he threatened to. Either way I guess it's in my best interest to stop throwing the garbage into the hall.

Garbage men are like Winston Churchill: They get no respect. A bunch of guys whose job it is to ride around on the back of a truck. That's the only highlight of their day. Then they have to haul your messy garbage to the truck and dump it in the back. In some cases. In other cases, the truck can do all the work. They hire Transformers or something, I don't know, but sometimes I watch through the blinds and see the truck pull up and the garbage can is lifted up by robot arms and dumped in the back. I always wonder what happened to the garbage men. I guess the real question is, is it a friendly Transformer or one of the evil ones? Like the Tony Soprano thing, I don't care to find out.

Being a garbage man is the worst job in the world. That's what I told myself when I was working at Trojan as a condom taster, and I stand by it. Sure, I went home feeling weird at the end of a long shift and you can't really get the taste of banana-flavored rubber out of your mouth, but at least only my tongue was worn out. With being a garbage man, that's probably a worse smell, and you have to move a lot. At least at the condom tasting job the other guy was the one doing all the moving.

What's even worse about being a garbage man, people always use you in negative examples. Some shithead kid doesn't do his homework and all of a sudden his mom is threatening to give your job to him. That mom better watch out. 'Cause if she's right and the kid becomes her garbage man one day, I bet she'll never get any furniture or boxes taken away. And the kid will be lapping it up. "I'm sorry, ma'am, that refrigerator box isn't officially in the dumpster, so we're not allowed to take it. Fuck you, mom. You should have shelled out the money for a tutor if you wanted your boxes picked up."

I wonder if you can even pick up garbage on your own home route, or if they assign you to some other route on purpose. Like it's a conflict of interest or something. Like a doctor can't operate on her own son. The garbage manager stops the guy as he's on the way out the door, all like, "I'm assigning you another route, Bill. You're too close to this case." That would be pretty cool, I guess. The other highlight of the job. Then you're right up in the ranks with doctors and lawyers. Because if your mom comes into the Burger King and wants a Whopper, you still have to wait on her. No matter how much she's making fun of you.

There's got to be some mobility in being a garbage man. Better routes or something. Like if you get in good with the boss or get a lot of letters of recommendation from people on your route, you can get reassigned to the rich people's routes or something. The kind of routes where people just throw out hundred dollar bills because they got dirty and shit. But then you probably couldn't even take them. Some kind of garbage collectors' code I don't know about. You see perfectly good sea food lying right on top, not even dirty, but you're bound by honor not to eat it. That's gotta suck.

There's so much I don't know.

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