Last Night at Work

Was interesting, to say the least.

To start it all off, at 1800, I punched in at my main office, gathered up my work and drove on down to the transfer station, where I work until 0100. Trying to work down there is a PITA: The computers are slow, it stinks to high heaven and I’m constantly being interrupted to scale someone in or out. But duty calls so I’m there.

At around 2300, one of the third party guys rolls up to the outbound scale window to weight out. I open the window to make sure what he originally said was in the box was actually what was in the box. He confirms and I turn to the scale computer to complete his ticket.

Unlike the inboud window, the outbound window is like the ones at a fast-food drive through and it closes by itself. I usually find this annoying, having to open the window every time I want to hand something out or retrieve something, but last night, I gained a new respect for it.

Right after I turned to the scale computer and the window clicked shut, I hear a ‘pop’ noise and a splash against the window. A hose from one of the hydraulic lines on the truck had burst and sprayed hot hydraulic fluid from the concrete and up over the roof of the scalehouse.

I wear steel toe and steel footbed shoes because I have duties that require them. I do not have goggles or a facemask to protect me from something like this.

So, at 0100, I go back to my office with my box of completed work to finish off the rest of my tasks. This is where the night turns goofy.

Right after I sit down, one of the guys pipes up about a box that is just too damn heavy for his truck to lift. It is basically 10 cubic yards of overripe lemons, limes and oranges. After calling the customer and leaving a message as to why their box is still full, the driver goes on a tear about how he likes to pick up their usual 4 cubic yard box of bad citrus because two stops before that one, he picks up a box of bad fish, and the citrus box always kills the stink.

He has planned his entire second load on this sequence of boxes and is not happy that his odor-killing box is a no-go. After four or five minutes of the yakety-yak, I give him the location of someone else in the produce business and OK a free dump for them so that he can get rid of his stinky load and STFU.

At 0230, I find out the reason I’m missing a driver that morning from one of the shop guys: the guy was doing 12oz curls and working with his chainsaw. Oops, kickback and his left hand comes off the control handle and into the rotating sharp things. Oww. He’ll be out for a good long while.

The strange part is that I’m in the market for a new chainsaw. I cannot let the Analog Wife know about this accident, or she’ll do the wifely thing and attempt to nix the “Dangerous Object Purchase”. Yes, I know and she knows that I’m smart enough not to drink and cut, but women are women for a reason: So they can worry semi-professionally. 

Around 0400, I get a radio call from one of the recycle drivers to look at a ticket submitted by our customer service department that contains a note from a customer. This customer is asking (actually, nearly demanding) that we push our pick-up time for his business back to after 0800. The driver is normally there between 0400 and 0430 and this stop is as far north as the driver goes all day and is grouped with a bunch of other stops that need to be picked up before traffic gets heavy. To re-route this stop would mean re-sequencing a good portion of the route and the driver says he just can’t do it.

The business in a cemetary on a major thoroughfare, and there aren’t any homes nearby, so I send a note back to the serivce rep telling him all this and asking if the customer is afraid we’ll wake up the residents. We’ll see how that flys tonight, I guess.

And then, as a last act of weirdness, I get a call at 0500 from a driver telling me that some drunk has jumped the outer fence at a business, then a trash bin enclosure wall, and then pried open a locked cardboard dumpster and was now sleeping in the dumpster.

This situation isn’t really all that weird, we actually get this a couple times a week. In fact, this particular drunk is a semi-regular in the area. Normally, he’ll hear the truck roll up and take off, but not this morning.

So I call 911 and let them know the guy is trespassing. The call receiver asks me if the driver could confirm if the man was OK. I let her know that the driver has already left, but that if she could get someone there quickly, they could give her that info.

She then flat out asked me if I cared that the man might be dead. I told her “Frankly, no. After the guy flipped my driver off when the driver opened the enclosure area to get the box, both he and I lost interest in the guy’s well-being. He had jumped a 10ft fence, topped with barbed wire, then again jumped over another wall, and then pried open a locked dumpster, probably causing damage to the box. If he’s not OK, he sure is pretty strong for a dead guy.”

She didn’t say a word and just hung up on me.

I went home 10 minutes later.

Tonight should be even more fun!