A summer riding on a big (garbage) truck

I have to admit I was less than thrilled when I first found out that the summer job my mom had gotten for me was riding on a garbage truck in the middle of the night. I'm not sure why it came as such a surprise, since I did know that it would be a position at the garbage company that she worked for. Still, being a "Route Verifier," as the job was called, had its advantages — mainly the pay rate of $14-per-hour plus overtime.

The job itself was quite easy to get a handle on. I would sit in the truck as the driver worked through his daily routes, and all I had to do was to take down a few simple bits of information: Making sure the address on the sheet was correct, commenting on the condition of the garbage container, the time it took to service the stop and the sequence number of each stop.

Contrary to what most people, including myself, first think of when they hear the phrase "riding on a garbage truck," I did not actually get to handle any of the trash. The particular trucks I was in were front-end loaders — they had huge bins for trash on the back and big forks in front that were used to lift and dump the front-end containers — not the kind a person sees taking his curbside household waste.

At first I expected to be uncomfortable in the trucks. But I soon found that most of the drivers I rode with were pretty interesting, in one way or another, and that they all loved their jobs. The hours weren't hard to get used to. They changed every week, and having to be awake at all hours of the night just kept me in good practice for when I returned to campus in September.

It wasn't long before I could tell the difference between a six-yard and an eight-yard container without a second thought and spot a heap of "non-compactible trash" a mile away. Talking to the drivers and hearing the stories they told was really cool. They knew exactly who all of the customers were and what their schedules were like, even when they went on vacation every year.

That is not to say that the job was all fun and games. New Jersey summers can get pretty hot, and not all of the trucks had air conditioning. Sometimes we would start our route at two in the morning and not get back into the office until four in the afternoon. And, of course, there were times when all I wanted to do was go to sleep, but sleeping through customer stops would have gotten me fired.

These are only minor complaints though, especially when I thought of all the money I was going to make just for every hour I would sit in the truck. I really was having a good time doing it, and the work was not at all hard to do. It was a comforting thought to know that many of my fellow Princetonians were not getting paid as much while doing work that was either harder, more boring or both.

When I was on the truck, there was time to think about just about anything. Sitting at the dumpsites, I usually just wrote out and organized lists of my favorite characters in my favorite comic books. It was nothing too profound or important, just the beauty of having time to do things like that. I would try to think back to the last time that I was on campus and I thought I had time for something so trivial, but I never really remembered any.

Life as a college student is great, but being the complete opposite of that for a few months was the most refreshing contrast I could have asked for. It was really special just to realize again that the lives we live are not the only lives people live, seeing that there are people on the other side of things who are just as interesting and just as satisfied with as we are.

For that reason, I think, I will always look back fondly on the summer of 2000, and all of its beauties. Remembering the feeling of sitting next to a driver telling all about what's wrong with "Survivor," listening to Howard Stern shouting obscenities over the airwaves and looking out the window at all the sights as I tour around the little state that I'm proud to call home, I cannot think of a better way to have spent a summer morning.

Mike Jenkins '03 is an English major from Roselle, NJ.

'A Glimpse Within' is a weekly column in which we ask members of the Princeton community to share personal experiences. The 'Prince' welcomes submissions of about 650 words to The Newsroom.