While most seniors-to-be were gaining valuable career experience with internships and jobs in their future fields this year, I was out for just one thing: cold, hard cash. And so I spent my summer in the dirtiest, grimiest place I could imagine. No, not New Jersey (before the BU contingent of the New Jersey Board of Commerce sends another 15 letters celebrating the glory of the Garden State, find your senses of humor and realize that no one from 49 other states and however many countries are represented here cares about the finer points of Jersey. It’s a cesspool, end of story).
For the love of money, I learned to love the garbage of the residents of the City of Nashua in the great state of New Hampshire.
That’s right I sold my soul to become a garbage man.
Predictably, it wasn’t the cleanest way to go about my summer. Dirt, maggots and disgusting water (of which I would prefer not to know the contents) spilled all over me many times during the summer.
Of course, there was the smell. Oh, the smell. Try to imagine the stench of dirty diapers mixed with rotting food mixed with maggots mixed with oil mixed with dog excrement, and you may have an idea of what my first few weeks smelled like. As Han Solo said, ‘My, what a lovely smell you’ve discovered.’
And then, amazingly, the smell just sort of went away.
I don’t think I could rationally explain how elements like the aforementioned, no matter how often I had to deal with them (that would be every working day), would just stop smelling. Apparently, the way to stop smelling crap is to smell it for five hours a day, five days a week. Who knew?
Adding to this lovely smorgasbord of appealing elements was the wake up time. I rose from the dead at six in the a.m. Monday through Friday, starting two days after I got home from school. So after three years of going to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning, I started going to bed before the 11 ‘o clock news. This made weekends sort of hellish too, as I found it difficult to sleep past 9 a.m. no matter how late I went to bed on Friday night.
Sox games replaced nights out as I realized hittin’ the bars and waking at 6 a.m. don’t mix so well. I didn’t see nearly as much of my friends as I would have liked, and my tolerance is at a frightening low.
But I’ll be going back next year if I’m not writing riveting sports pieces for the masses, because despite all of this figurative and literal crap, I enjoyed my work.
There were the tangible benefits, like 13 bucks an hour, tips that included money, beer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 and some good free stuff that proved the old trash adage is true, and then the intangibles, like a bunch of good guys amongst both the summer help and the full time union guys.
I was surprised I found another guy who could discuss the finer points of The Misfits’ ‘Last Caress.’ I found friends in guys with whom I could talk hockey and baseball, all while just laughing when they bitched about each other. And I also learned that nothing is better than sitting down for the last 15 minutes of the shift to watch ‘Family Guy’ with a bunch of guys (it’s awkward to watch that show in front of females).
I learned it isn’t nearly as hard to throw a couch into the back of a garbage truck alone as it is to move a couch with two people. I learned that the ancient translation of union is ‘we can do whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want, and never catch hell for it.’ Shockingly, I also found out that I looked a whole lot less like the Michelin Man after a summer of picking up thousands of pounds of trash per day compared to those glorious summers spent delivering (and eating) pizza.
Oh yeah, and I learned that no matter what job I have, I end up hating a lot of the people that I’m working for, namely half the citizens of Nashua. Among oversized barrels, trash on the lawns and cardboard boxes stuffed with crap on rainy days, the simple truth is that the majority of people have no concern for other people, and they just want things to be easier on them. Luckily, we were allowed to leave behind heavy barrels, so as not to kill our backs, and since my job description didn’t include cleaning up yards, if trash wasn’t in a barrel or bag, it wasn’t getting on my truck (that’s right, don’t mess with the garbage man).
So you might have taken away that much needed experience from your summer vocation, but I got money, a little booze, a new BMX and a nice new scar on my knee from my summer in the dump.
And no one can deny that it’s unassailably cool that I got to ride on the back of those trucks.
Nick Cardamone, a senior in the College of Communication, is a former Sports Editor and Day Editor of The Daily Free Press
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