(Click thumbnail image for enlargement) Here's an update from yesterday's garbage man damage report. The cable guy spliced the TV cable yesterday afternoon. He did a nice job. I gave him an orange from the orange tree.
The phone company won't come until Saturday. I was getting tired of having no internet or landline phone, so late yesterday afternoon I grabbed the phone cable that was lying across the road and ran with it quickly to the ladder and got up on the roof with it. (I had to run fast because there were a lot of cars on the street and I didn't want one to drive into the cable when it was only a couple of feet off the ground.) Then I took a bunch of wire nuts and some wire strippers and spliced the severed wires. Doesn't it look pretty? This ought to do until the phone repairman comes and yells at me for fixing it myself.
Also, here are a couple of emails I've gotten about yesterday's incident:
Jay says: I feel your pain about having the lines cut–I work from home and the loss of my cable line would be a disaster. And your garbage man sounds like a jerk. But don't castigate them all. There are deadlines–the crap has to be picked up in one day whether every house leaves one bag or a small mountain. I think there is plenty of stress too. Garbage stinks–and plenty of it is heavy and awkward to lift. I have left hot water tanks, washers, dryers, mounds of wet drywall, paneling, chunks of concrete–and plenty of good ol' household waste. It gets cleared away without fanfare, and I am very grateful. I live in a pretty affluent community and the garbage men make about 13 bucks an hour. Maybe trying to make ends meet on that paltry sum engenders some anger; for sure, it is hard to derive much joy and fun from life on such a cruddy wage. Or maybe it is the people who get impatient and roar around a stopped truck and nearly run them down all the time. Whatever. I don't call that well-paid, and I am ashamed it isn't higher.
You had a bad day for sure, but I thought I'd point out how you came across and offer the other side. Boingboing is one the few things that lives up to its billing "a directory of wonderful things." Just this once, not so wonderful. — JayLevi says: If you're looking for an answer [to the question "Why are garbage men so angry?], re-read what you said. When times get
tough, you can fall back on your social status, education, or whatever
else you inherently feel the world owes you. He, on the other hand,
gets the shit end of that world payment structure. He implicitly takes
the shit from people like you for being lesser than you. Feed that
cycle back for years and years, and you get your incident today.Greg says: Here are some answers:
1) He was as high as he thought he could be and still do his job. It's a boring job.
2) Realistically, it's not all that well-paid, and there's no room for advancement, especially without a bit of education.
3) They can be fired, but they have to work at it. Maybe this is his chance? One of our guys rolled his oversize truck on a residential street in front of a visiting dignitary. That works, but you need to be on a hill.
4) It's a boring job, and you only get to listen to junk radio.Joshua says: Our garbagemen knocked over our mailbox and just kept going. Which meant
the post office wouldn't deliver our mail until the mailbox was fixed (because
they post office won't deliver to our door, only to our streetside mailbox–I
don't know why). My wife called our landlady, who called the city about the
mailbox. The mailbox was fixed (by our handyman), but as far as we know,
nothing ever happened to the garbagemen who knocked over the mailbox.
