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Sanitation Engineers From Hell
| Article
# : |
14247 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
1,048 Words |
| Author
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Larry R. Moffitt
Larry R. Moffitt is executive director of the World Media
Association. |
This was going to be an extraordinary Saturday morning. Our three-year-old had stayed up late last night eating Trix and fell asleep watching Sci-Fi Theater with us. This meant she would not wake up until 8:30 at the earliest, maybe 9:00. My morning schedule was packed full with sleep, to be followed with coffee, eggs, and a strict regimen of newspaper reading.
Then at 6:15 A.M. my eyes jerked open as if vandals had tied the lids to a door and slammed it. I sat up with a horrible realization. The experience was like one of those spiritual phenomena stories where your Uncle Harry dies, and at that instant, 8,000 miles away, you hear his voice say. "Hi there, Larry, I'm dead now." Only this time the voice was not disembodied. It was my unethereal own and it said, "Oh, my God. It's garbage day."
The garbage truck would be here in fifteen minutes. It comes at 6:30 every Saturday morning. The shouting men banging cans, the untuned Mack truck engine, and the loud hydraulic trash squasher are the only unfailingly punctual things in my life. If the world were thrown into thermonuclear war one Friday evening, the garbage men would be there the day after, sifting through the rubble in search of trash.
Our cans were still sitting out back next to the garage. This was no small deal. No cans on the front curb, no collection. Imagine--the stuff ripens for another week until it puts forth an odor that makes you cringe. Developing its own life force, the stench takes on a solid form, severs its umbilical connection from the mother heap, gives itself a comforting name like "Spike," and marches down the street, kicking in the doors of houses, chasing the occupants into the streets. In the summertime even the most benign combination of coffee grounds and table scraps can spontaneously generate a swamp creature the likes of which Sci-Fi Theater has never dreamed.
For some reason our household effluent is far greater than the sum of everything we drag home, which includes groceries, work from the office, and junk mail.
Getting the cans to the street meant getting out of bed and into some clothes. It meant hauling the loathsome trash to the curb and it meant scrapping a morning so perfect it could only be called a designer Saturday. It was a rotten little job, but somebody had to do it. I looked at my wife.
"It's GARBAGE day," I said
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