I watched a show last night on the “big business of garbage,” blew my mind. The base starting salary for NYC Sanitation Department garbage men is $70k! Sure when their day is up they probably smell worse than your average homeless village in the middle of the summer but I think I could handle that. Fresh air (somewhat), exercise, and the thing I crave the most in a job, the ability to just shut your mind off and zone out for a few hours. I mean that’s what it’s all about, no stress, just pure uninterrupted day dreaming.
It occurred to me while I was still scrambling through excel sheets at 7:45 last night that I’m being taken for a sucker. Here I am putting in overtime (that I’m not going to be paid for) trying to ignore the United Nations cleaning crew while they blow dust into my cube and vacuum my area despite the countless rows of empty cubes they could otherwise be cleaning, knowing that Garbage Man Joe is out there toasting with his fellow trash pickers on their fat paychecks laughing at the rest of us that went to college and are stuck working in cube farms for longer hours and less pay.
And the kicker is it’s probably a better career prospect as well. Banks and Finance seem to be comfortably seated on the toilet reading their Wall Street Journals, and just about any other office job is easily moveable to India and their billion person cheap labor work force (Have some respect India, make some demands, did you learn nothing from British occupancy? Frigen Ghandi, the man did nothing but leave your country in 3rd world status). So that leaves manual labor. We’re going to run out trees and yards to landscape soon enough, and that just leaves garbage.
Then again, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “its probably a union thing.”
