In my little slice of the Polygon, trash collection has always been a bit of a theatrical production.
Back when I first started working down here, everyday at more or less three o’clock, our doorbell would ring and in would roll – literally roll – a man whom here I'll call Ishmael, the Trash Guy.
“TDRASH COLL … TDRASH!”
And we’d all stop what we were doing, get up out of our chairs like prairie dogs answering a call, and bring our wastebaskets to the front of the room where he was waiting, beckoning for our trash as though he were hawking peanuts at a baseball game.
As we’d bring him our cans and dump our refuse in his giant rolling bin, he’d heckle us:
“Where you been? …I not see you yestaday… you come to work?”
“No man! I was here,” my cohort would say. “I see you coming, I run.”
“Ahhh, ha ha ha ha… you not work enough! …here , here, you need new bag?”
“No thanks, I’m good. You gave me one yesterday. This one’s still clean.”
“Ahhh, s’clean? Okay, maybe too-morrow… maybe if you come to work… I be here!”
“Okay! Bye Ishmael, you take care!”
“Okay … Bye!” And out he rolled.
Peace was upon us once again.
When a new fellow took charge of our office, he started to question things: the way things were run, the way paperwork was routed, and his chief complaint with the status quo was the daily “Trash Call” ballet.
As it happened, about mid-summer, the trash collection ceased to be so regular. Maybe this was because it was, well, mid-summer in DC, when everything slows down because Congress is not in session. So why not trash pick-up? In fact one week, there was no pick-up at all. The following couple of weeks we only saw good Ishmael once, maybe twice. When he did, he’d even more vociferously complain that we weren’t in when he came a’ ringin’ – slim chance, seeing that rarely were all five of us out of the office.
Summer fruit and other lunch particles got a little smelly after a couple of days, so I did some research and found the right person to complain to – not any easy job in the Polygon, mind you.
The very next day Ishmael returned, angry… angry that we had complained to his supervisor that he had not come. “Why you call? Why you call and get me in trouble!”
He felt betrayed.
Hell, we just wanted our trash collected. What happened to that nice little prairie dog, peanut hawking system we had working so smoothly before?
I don’t know. But it was gone. Trust was broken. And our relationship would never be the same.
As I mentioned before, the new fellow – let’s call him “Slim” – thought the whole ballet was absurd and, undoubtedly beneath him, even though he said that it certainly wasn’t beneath him to dump his own trash can into the big refuse bucket at the beck and call of a small man with a heavy accent. Slim did some reading – which is not saying anything new; Slim was always reading.
Anyway, Slim did some reading up on the Polygon trash rules and contracts. “You know,” he started in with us, trying to gather allies, “you know… we don’t have to bring our trash to him.” Slim started speaking in a hushed tone, leaning forward and tapping his fingers together. “By his contract, he is supposed to go around to each desk and pick up our wastebasket and dump it himself. He is supposed to go around to everyone’s desk and quietly pick up and dispose of our trash. None of this ‘Trash Call!’ baloney!” he concluded as he waved his hand in disgust.
“I am going to talk to him about it tomorrow,” Slim continued, “or the next time he comes in here, and remind him what his contract says… let him know that I know what it says… that we know what it says...”
“Sure, okay,” one of us assented.
“Yeah, whatever, I don’t have a problem with that,” another agreed.
“Yeah, I did feel kind of silly pandering to him, parading my trash,” I added.
Loaf was out, so he didn’t get a vote.
The very next day I think it was, at some inconsistent time (he had long since ceased to be punctual), Ishmael rolled in.
“TDRASH COLL … TDRASH!”
And we all just sat there.
All of us except, of course, Slim.
He came out of his office, strode to the door and asked Ishmael if he could have a word with him outside.
We all slunk in our desks and stared straight ahead, like kids or puppies would when they know that someone else is getting yelled at, however more culpable that pitiable creature may be.
In a couple of minutes (Man, that was a good long ass-chewing!), they both came back in the room. We had all since pulled our wastebaskets out from under our desks and had positioned them at the corner of each cubicle row as Slim had instructed us to: the proper post for the new “Trash Call.”
And Ishmael quietly rolled around the room, picking up each wastebasket in turn with his grubby grippy-palmed gardening gloves, softly dumping each one into the big bin.
Then he somberly rolled out… a beaten man… a shadow of his former self.
Ishmael has never missed a day of trash pick up since. Each day he has quietly rolled in and dutifully collected and dumped each of our cans. It is with no small amount of gladness, however, that I note that as the weeks and months have elapsed since his Trash Talk with Slim, Ishmael has gotten progressively more chipper, even a little bit flippant, insulting the Redskins, questioning everyone’s whereabouts, taking attendance… but nothing like the revelry of old.
But last week… Last week, things got pretty silly again.
Late Monday afternoon, a different trash guy rolled in. This new garbage guy was jovial enough, but sort of struck me as a little creepy. Not sure just what it was, the crazy fly away hair-do, the apron askew, the unusually ruddy complexion… no, this was a trash collector after all. I didn’t expect him to abide by regulation grooming standards.
He came over to where Bill and I were seated, to pick up the wastebaskets posted at the edge of our cubicles. And he stood there, rather ceremoniously, waiting to be noticed or at the very least humored. Being a couple of days before Thanksgiving, we humored him. “Hey, what’s your favorite color?” he asked me.
“Blue,” I answered quickly, wondering if I was going to be summarily ejected from my chair and shot through the ceiling if I prevaricated like a Monty Python character.
“Well, I’ve got… this color!” It wasn’t blue. It was purple. A purple bead necklace.
Creepy!
I started to get backflashes – I mean flashbacks – of acts of Mardi Gras I’d never even performed … what did this guy want?
“Here, I will give you this one and this one!” he bubbled with glee as he pulled gold and a purple bead necklaces from his apron pouch.
Yes, I am fully aware of how creepy this sounds – try living it.
Bill likewise looked on uncomfortably. What did this guy want me to do with this crap? I was in uniform… I certainly wasn’t going to wear them, let alone reveal something for them.
So, I smiled and thanked him. After all, I didn’t want to be mean.
After he left, I picked the bead necklaces up with just two fingers and put them on Slim’s desk.
When he returned from lunch, he asked me what they were for and what did I do to get them. We chuckled about that, and as I was shuddering at the thought, he hung them on a thumbtack on my cubicle.
Just looking at them out of the corner of my eye kind gave me a sour taste in my throat … like I was tasting garbage… all of those places the beads had been… all of those other trash cans… all of the rolling barrels and bins and dumpsters those things must have seen.
Creepy!
I threw them in my garbage can.
Then Tuesday came. No Ishmael. It was crazy BeadBoy again.
Quick! I had to pull my beads from the trash… and hide them… so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings, but also so that he wouldn’t see them and remember our sentimental exchange.
Fortunately for me and all things mannerly, he was distracted, some might say downright lathered up. The sky was falling. He asked to borrow our phone.
“Sure!” I told him while I furtively guarded the area around my trash can.
“Which one…?????”
“Oh, you can use that one. No one uses that desk.” I offered Loaf’s old phone.
He picked up the handset and dialed his supervisor:
“Hey! I’m doing Ishmael’s route … Tri-Ark is down here trying to pull trash. There are three people from Tri-Ark just telling me they took the floor over.”
[Oh no! Say it isn’t so! The much feared trash wars have begun!]
“There are 3 people from Tri-Ark telling me they got an email to take over…”
[Not this turf… what’s Ishmael going to think? Hardly the Thanksgiving sprit!]
“I can skip this area?”
“The ones I pulled yesterday, I can still pull, right?”
“And the 92 I can get… and the whole hallway is gone to them”
“Okay, I’ll commence.” He hangs up.
“You’re lucky,” he assures us. “You’re on the route. This takes about ten rooms off of the list. I just talked to the assistant general manager. You’re on the list. You’re lucky. I can still pull you guys.”
Yeah, real lucky. Now you’re talkin’!
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