Seeing How the Other Half Work
By: Melissa Ostrow
For: Outlook
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Editor's note: This is the second in a two-part series on the university's solid waste management division. Journalism student Melissa Ostrow spent a morning with two employees as they went about their jobs. In this week's installment, she rides around in the rolloff trash truck.
I had spent half the morning with Rey Bell, experiencing the life of a front-end driver at the university and I was ready to find out what it was like to pull dumpsters. Mark Wilson came over the radio, ready to make the swap.
I climbed up into the big red Mack truck he calls Tony or sometimes grandma, depending on how it is pulling. He calls the truck Tony when he is proud of it in honor of its first driver, but when the truck is pulling slow, he yells "Come on, grandma!"
Many would describe Mark as a good-looking guy, about 5'11", with a moustache. Born in Baltimore and raised in Ellicott City, Mark graduated from high school wanting to go into the Marines. Because of the war in Vietnam, however, his parents wouldn't let him go, so he came to work for the university. Unlike Rey, Mark's job varies from day to day. He has a usual schedule of dining halls he visits, but each day he has a new list of rolloffs and compactors he has to pick up. Roll-offs are large boxes that usually have open tops, while a compactor is a closed dumpster that compacts the garbage put into it.
When I got to the parking lot, Mark was about to begin pulling the compactor. He backed up the roll-off truck in front of the compactor, disconnected the compactor, strapped the compactor doors shut and hooked the cable from the truck onto the compactor. Then he backed up perfectly straight to line up the rails on the truck with the compactor rails. He can tell if the compactor is straight, by looking in his side mirrors to see if the compactor is equally distributed on the sides of the truck. Sometimes Mark can make it in one try, but he averages about three times. This time it took all three tries.
Once he thought it was straight, the flat bed in the back came up and stood at a 45-degree angle over top of the little compartment Mark and I sat in. Then the wire would slowly pull the compactor up the slant until locked into position. Once the compactor and cable were locked in, Mark lowered the flat bed.
For safety, Mark has to keep the compactor at a tilt above the back window until it has completely locked into position, as otherwise it could roll right on top of him. Finally the compactor was on, but we were not done. The compactor still had to be turned around. We headed to Lot 1, a large empty parking lot. The process began again. It reminded me of a roller coaster slowly climbing to the top of a hill, shaky but sturdy. Then he slowly let it down like putting a sleeping child to bed. After all was set, we began the long haul to the dump.
Mark has worked two jobs for most of his adult life. Every morning he wakes up at 3:30 a.m. to allow enough time to get from his house in Baltimore to the university. He works until 1:30 p.m. and then works out at the gym until 2:30 p.m. He then heads to his second job doing custodial work for Howard County schools, where he remains until 11 p.m. He goes home and relaxes before going to sleep around midnight. He sleeps about three hours a day.
He explained why he does this. When his father died, he asked Mark to take care of his mom. "Everything she wants, she gets," he says with a proud smile. Mark also has three kids he helps support, is trying to buy a house and just likes to be in the position where he can go out and buy a motorcycle, if he wants. "I like having two jobs, it keeps me out of trouble," he smirks.
When I asked Mark if he likes it here, he is slow to answer. "It's all right. When I get up in the morning I know I have a job. I don't have to worry about pink slips." However, Mark would rather be driving an 18-wheeler like his dad did. But he likes the benefits of health insurance and paid vacations offered by the university.
With all that work and no sleep, Mark somehow stays awake in the traffic without any coffee. He just drinks water and smokes his Marlboro Lights. "It's nice to have someone to talk to," he tells me. "It's not a sense of being lonely, but sometimes if you are tired, you want someone to talk to and to share the experience of the bad drivers." Mark and I talked about the bad drivers on the beltway, as we sat in traffic. A little yellow car had flipped into the median.
When we got to the dump, we drove up on a big scale and into what looked like a giant warehouse. It was filled with the noise of unloading trucks, throwing their garbage into a massive, smelly heap. Mark backed the truck in, threw on his reflector vest and hard hat and went to the back to untie the doors. He wears overalls to keep the garbage from splattering all over his clothes. "Just because I work in trash doesn't mean I have to come home smelling like it every day."
Organized solid waste has been around a long time, Benjamin Franklin started the first municipal street cleaning operation in Philadelphia. in 1757. However, it wasn't until 1885 that the first garbage incinerator was built in New York to grind down the garbage. Then in 1899 the New York Street Cleaning Commissioner organized the first rubbish sorting plant for recycling in the United States.
After Mark dumped all the garbage, he lowered the compactor flat and a bulldozer came by and pushed all the garbage into a pile to be taken to the landfill. It was amazing to see that much garbage all piled up. We weighed out on exit, so that we would have a bill for how much we dumped; garbage costs about $47 a ton. Then we had to turn the compactor around again. After 8 a.m. it is too hard to do it on campus because of all the cars, so he turns it around at the dump. After the compactor was safely on, we headed back into traffic.
Mark hates traffic, because he constantly has to be on the clutch and the brake. "It can wear your legs out."
We made our way back to the university and Mark backed the truck into the back of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. There were two lines in the ground, from the wheels on the compactor, that he used as guides for where he should place the unit. Once the compactor was in its correct spot, he attached it back onto the building and checked that it was working properly. After the compactor was checked we went to the recycling center and picked up a rolloff filled with white paper. Every year the university has to make a quota of recycling 20 percent of the solid waste and usually they do.
So, next time you're up early enough to see the garbage dragged away or catch a person dragging out a recylcing bin, make sure to smile and wave at the men who make our world a little cleaner.
