My Junk Era
No, I'm sorry, we can't clean out your half-filled garage for the minimum charge.
With my new job, I’ve played a vital role in each part of the accumulated crap life cycle:
UPS: I bring you the crap.
Moving company: I move the crap to a second location.
Junk company: I take the crap away.
That’s a cutesy anecdote I sometimes draw on when I want to butter customers up for a tip and convey the impression that I am no ordinary junksman, but rather a jack of all trades. I’ve worked enough of these jobs to trick myself into thinking some measure of expertise has rubbed off. At any rate, I’m pretty good at knowing which angles to take carrying a couch out of your place. I may not know how to disassemble your pool table, but I’ll figure it out within 20 minutes. And I know for sure that I can sledgehammer a swing set or a shed to pieces if need be, provided it’s a wooden one.
2022 has worn me down, in ways that seem perplexing to me in the moment. It’s not like any of the last five years has been anything less than grueling. Sure, I worked multiple jobs at once this year, but in 2018 I juggled three jobs, and in one 60-day stretch that year, I worked every day for at least one of them. I don’t recommend it.
Such is the extent that I hated UPS. For a while, I stuck it out, made an honest effort to make it work, and genuinely went for the full-time supervisor position they spent six months dangling in my face. As much as I disliked the company culture, I know I need another viable course in life now I’ve been sabotaged by spineless, lying, self-serving “journalists” so I was willing to suck it up and be that guy. Nevertheless, UPS lied to me, like everyone lies to me and about me, strung me along, and fucked me over. As soon as I cottoned on to what they were doing, I was gone. My ball-busting supervisor told me, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll promote you after Christmas.” I know they’re full of shit and simply pulling the carrot back a little further. Fool me once, etc.
After carpet bombing job boards with applications for months and a subsequent spate of interviews, I made the lateral move to a junk removal company. Of course, like all positions advertised on Indeed, the company lied about starting pay. Damn near every job lies on Indeed, whether it be about pay, or, as I discovered in 2021 with the copywriting position, the expected duties are sometimes three times as much as stated. Sickening stuff, amid a time when these bloodsuckers are whining that no one wants to work.
At the tender age of 40, I’m actively aware that I need not be subjecting my body to further unforced degredation. Obviously not much of a choice, and I’m grateful my body has held out as long as it has. I’ve proven resilient, yet I know the clock is ticking, and however snakebit my future feels, I must find a solution soon.
Much of the service area I cover is the same place where I worked as a political canvasser in 2019 and early 2020 before the Covid lockdown - Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince Williams counties in Northern Virginia. I cast plaintive looks at areas I recognize from those days, pangs of recognition from time I wasted helping the Democratic Party, two years after I was smeared by their convictionless media goons. Sure, even then, before the full extent of their treachery was apparent, I wasn’t an enthusiast for the Dems, and considered helping them to be harm reduction at best. I still [clap emoji] did [clap emoji] the [clap emoji] work. I had conservatives ripping up literature in my face. One of my coworkers was chased off a property with a shotgun in Loudoun (you might remember that county as a hotbed of parents fighting schools over teaching CRT in 2021). I spent a summer riding around in my car with no AC, marching my happy ass around new exurban housing developments with no shade because the newly planted trees haven’t had a chance to grow yet, being on the right side of history™, and all the public figures representing that faction, the supposed lesser evil, do is lie more, and more, and more. I voted third party in the midterms for the one House race on the ballot where I live, and I probably wouldn’t have voted at all if the early voting office weren’t a pleasant five-minute walk from where I get my hair cut.
If you didn’t see me talk about my time at UPS, a persistent theme was agonizing over my role in management, and feeling bad for having to enforce the company’s impossible demands of its workers and their union. While the small business vibes of my new job make the day-to-day experience more tolerable, there are pitfalls to the small business vibe, tradeoffs like anything else in life, for example - rampant favoritism and its casual bending of the rules in favor of certain individuals.
That first training week, I was paired with a crew that included a black navigator and his Hispanic driver. The navigator is endlessly catered to at the company, to the point that in all-staff morning meetings, management openly acknowledges that some rules don’t apply to him, and he doesn’t have to do many things other employees are required to do. He’s consistently the top revenue earner in our franchise, though a not-small reason for that is that admin holds many of the best jobs for him. He can do the job okay, and he is adept at hustling customers on estimates, but he ain’t that good. And he already left the company once and came back, so it should be clear he has no real loyalty, and yet… Wouldn’t be surprised if he has dirt on the boss of the franchise. Little other explanation for how much he gets everything he wants. Oh, and he spends all day demeaning his driver, but the driver sticks with him because he knows the guy always gets assigned the best route, so as long as he shuts up and takes his abuse, he’ll make decent money. I bit my tongue because I knew after that training week I wouldn’t have to work with him again, and other than morning meetings, I barely see him.
That favortism would be easier to take if said guy weren’t also abusing it to run others down. During that week, the guy told me, apropos of nothing, that I “look like a fed” and that he “hates white people.” Even without me saying anything about him running his mouth, after asking how it was going being with him, coworkers and even a member or two of management gave me defeated looks acknowledging he’s a troll and I shouldn’t listen to him. Uh, but he’s training me? You don’t see the issue there? I did not tell on the guy for any of his comments, and there’s a decent chance that the ops people would have supported him regardless or just let it slide given how much preferential treatment he receives. Still, as a trainer and someone representing the company, what he told me is unbelievably stupid and dangerous. I could very easily sue the company for him creating a hostile work environment based on race hate. I remember one of my close black friends in high school having the proto-woke view that black people simply cannot be racist, because of power dynamics. Well, my man here was dealing with me directly on behalf of the company, and he was leveraging that power to belittle a subordinate, explicitly because of race. He’s a racist.
So I spent months agonizing over my own role in management at UPS, that I was tasked with helping enforce impossible standards for union drivers and pestering them with tedious safety ridealongs, only to leave and immediately deal with a supervisor at the next job with an almost uncanny ability to be an insulting, needling, unprofessional piece of shit. Ain’t life grand? Is it possible for anyone other than the most loathsome people to get ahead in this world?
As for the work itself, I’ve always been drawn to work that has me on the move, exploring new places, meeting new people, and there’s no lack of that here. I like the rest of the guys I get paired with besides the one racist trainer; they all have interesting stories and outlooks. A guy I frequently get paired with is a big Philly fan and one day I had one of the Phillies playoff games streaming live on my phone while he had to wait for a job. And there’s an endless array of things to comment on in the junk game. I’m in the minority at the company because I don’t habitually smoke or vape. Since smoking is banned in the trucks (yet vaping isn’t haha) common junk etiquette following a job is to drive just far enough to get out of view of the customer so the crew can blast some cigs. Of course, now that I’m in it, I can’t help but notice the plethora of junk companies that operate in the area. No doubt there are more here in NoVA than other parts of the country - lots of people here have money, and therefore can afford the service to mitigate the effects of the steady incoming and outgoing stream of stuff.
After a month and a half, I feel like I’ve gotten a handle on the job, and a keen familiarity with the various dumps and scrap metal yards in the tri-county area. I would say to you, the layperson trapped talking to me at a social function half-interested asking what my job is like, the vast majority of what we do can be grouped into two categories: THE REMAINS OF SUBURBAN AFFLUENCE and SAD AND/OR GROSS SITUATIONS.
SUBURBAN AFFLUENCE: Compared to the moving company, the average junk job is much shorter. With a few exceptions, we’re only getting a little bit or some of your stuff, not all of it. But that some of it is usually the biggest beast in the house - a pool table, a hot tub, a treadmill, an elliptical, an outdoor playset, a sleeper sofa, a gun safe, an armoire, a projection TV, a piano. After all, if these affluent Boomers and Gen Xers could do it themselves, they would. Instead, we’re there, so they can complain about the price while we remove an erstwhile big purchase that has reached the end of its consumption cycle.
Sometimes we get to smash stuff to pieces with a sledgehammer or cut it up with a Sawzall. I’ve done this twice so far, with a swing set and a big shed. This is both actually fun and not as fun as it sounds. The shed was sturdy and took us three-plus hours to demolish and clean up. Good thing it was fall and not summer. Trying to avoid all the loose nails can be a bit harrowing. The white liberal parents with their grown adopted Asian daughter spent the whole time chatting us up and telling us we were doing an awesome job then didn’t tip.
Had to take apart two pool tables so far. The first was literally my first taking apart a pool table and it showed as the customer was watching. We got it done in little over an hour, and the second time went really quick, it’s almost like I learned something. Thankfully I have avoided a hot tub removal, but it’s only a matter of time. I had to do an estimate for one, with a woman who was trying to sell her home. She mentioned her realtor said hot tubs hurt the resale value of homes because people don’t want to be saddled with getting rid of them. So people are financially incentivized to have us get rid of hot tubs. The market is trying to kill me.
Ye gods, do people love to tell me how nice the stuff they’re throwing out is and how someone should be/would be glad to have it. If it’s so nice… stay with me here… why are you getting rid of it? Okay, sometimes the customer’s hand is forced by circumstance. But I’ve had an old man lay some four-minute speech on me about the fine quality and condition of the couch he was junking, then I asked why he was getting rid of it, and he said he had a new one arriving the next day. Is it so, sir?
I understand having a guilty conscience about ditching some long-cherished item and not wanting to contribute to the destruction of the planet by adding one more large item to the dump. We do reuse, resell, donate, recycle a good amount, but we also do have to take some things to the dump. A substantial portion of what we get is undeniably trash.
As for people and their sentimental connections to their stuff - One 60ish man had us haul a sleeper sofa out of his basement. He felt the need to justify the decision to us.
“It’s a great couch. Had it for 30 years. I don’t know… It just…” He said, trying to find the words. To be fair, it was a nice couch, though in terms of style it seemed to belong to a bygone era.
“Its time has come,” I said.
“Its time has come,” he repeated.
Love to bear witness to funereal moments over sleeper sofas, on the job.
SAD AND/OR GROSS SITUATIONS: So we deal with a lot of death. Not the figurative death of your beloved sleeper. No, I mean a person has died, and we’re dealing with their stuff. Sometimes the dead people were hoarders, which adds another fun element.
One job, we were in an Indian family’s home. They guide to a side room where there’s a hospital-type bed. That, they tell us, is the bed they got so the grandmother could die at home around family, and now she’s dead, so we can take it away. Wait, the mother barely says over a whisper, her beads are still attached to the side rails. Just a moment, she breathes, let me remove those.
Another day, we had to clean out the basement shop of a dead husband who had been a woodworking cabinet and guitar maker. Interesting to see, but we can tell the widow is barely holding it together though her brothers are here to help. By the time we’re done it looks like the two of us took a bath in sawdust.
Another basement cleanout for a middle aged guy’s dead parents’ house, I find a framed Confederate $20 bill. We’re allowed to keep any little shit we want on jobs. I took it home to sell online, but having no takers, will just toss it.
There’s a Starbucks where women employees taking trash out to the dumpster were flashed by some creep, so our company has been contracted to take their trash out twice a day six days a week for a ridiculous amount of money for how easy it is. They usually have, like, six bags of trash and some cardboard. Such a laughably inefficient lazy corporate solution.
A man has cried in front of me explaining he has to clean out his dead parents’ house and he only has $300 to spend. I cut him the best deal I could, waved one of the company’s dumb surcharges, and though at one point he cut himself off explaining his plight to me by exclaiming, “oh, you don’t give a shit!” he was appreciative at the end, and tipped, which not as many people do as they should.
One very busy Saturday our route had 10 jobs. One that sticks with me is a middle aged woman with limited mobility. She hired us to remove trash bags and basically assorted filth from the trunk and back seat of her car, as well as her living room. Her place smelled like straight piss. After one trip inside, my coworker returned with Covid masks for me and him. I really felt like we were running the risk of shaming her. Indeed, I will put up with overwhelming pee odor to spare your feelings. And it’s not like the Covid masks did much to blunt it anyway. The woman mentioned she recently had water damage in her unit, and more work needed to be done. She was all alone except for Princess, the 13-year-old dog at her side. The dog looked to be in good shape for her age, then the woman mentioned the vet said she was starting to lose muscle mass.
Hey, it’s a good thing I’m numb.