Garbage Collectors’ Horror Stories That Happened on Pre-Dawn Shifts

I work in garbage collection, or public sanitation, as people around here usually call it.

It's hard, poorly paid work, and above all, it's filthy.

Over time, you get used to the smell.

At first, it makes you nauseous.

You smear VapoRub under your nose and wear two face masks, but after a week, you can barely even smell it anymore.

That stench of leachate, that sour, sickly sweet combination of rotten food, used diapers, and worse things, seeps into your skin, your clothes, and even the taste that lingers in your mouth.

You end up believing you become immune.

Or at least that's what I thought before that night.

We usually covered the downtown route and two residential neighborhoods.

But that week, truck number four blew its engine, and the boss, an arrogant fat man who has never once climbed aboard a truck to do the work, sent us to cover the mountain route.

That meant driving up dirt roads to collect waste from remote rural settlements and agricultural cooperatives.

My partner that night was Ciro.

Ciro is a man in his fifties, as dry as the soil in a rain-fed field, the kind who says three words in an hour and chain-smokes unfiltered Delicados.

I was behind the wheel.

He was in the passenger seat, nodding off against the window.

It was close to two in the morning.

The rain had been falling on and off for a while, that fine, irritating drizzle we call chippy-chippy around here.

It doesn't soak you all at once, but it ends up getting everything wet and makes the asphalt as slippery as soap.

We had to pass near the old municipal landfill, the one in San Hilario.

As I recall, that place has been officially closed since 2005.

They shut it down because it couldn't hold any more waste and because the leachate was contaminating the water wells in three villages farther downhill.

Now it looks like an enormous hill covered in vegetation, but if you dig down half a meter, you find trash from 20 years ago, almost intact.

Plastic is unforgiving.

The thing is, even though it's closed, plenty of people from the nearby villages still go there to dump things, either to avoid paying the fee or because the truck only comes by once in a great while.

They call it an illegal dump, but everyone knows about it, and nobody lifts a finger.

I work in garbage collection, or public sanitation, as people around here usually call it.

It's hard, poorly paid work, and above all, it's filthy.

Over time, you get used to the smell.

At first, it makes you nauseous.

You smear VapoRub under your nose and wear two face masks, but after a week, you can barely even smell it anymore.

That stench of leachate, that sour, sickly sweet combination of rotten food, used diapers, and worse things, seeps into your skin, your clothes, and even the taste that lingers in your mouth.

You end up believing you become immune.

Or at least that's what I thought before that night.

We usually covered the downtown route and two residential neighborhoods.

But that week, truck number four blew its engine, and the boss, an arrogant fat man who has never once climbed aboard a truck to do the work, sent us to cover the mountain route.

That meant driving up dirt roads to collect waste from remote rural settlements and agricultural cooperatives.

My partner that night was Ciro.

Ciro is a man in his fifties, as dry as the soil in a rain-fed field, the kind who says three words in an hour and chain-smokes unfiltered Delicados.

I was behind the wheel.

He was in the passenger seat, nodding off against the window.

It was close to two in the morning.

The rain had been falling on and off for a while, that fine, irritating drizzle we call chippy-chippy around here.

It doesn't soak you all at once, but it ends up getting everything wet and makes the asphalt as slippery as soap.

We had to pass near the old municipal landfill, the one in San Hilario.

As I recall, that place has been officially closed since 2005.

They shut it down because it couldn't hold any more waste and because the leachate was contaminating the water wells in three villages farther downhill.

Now it looks like an enormous hill covered in vegetation, but if you dig down half a meter, you find trash from 20 years ago, almost intact.

Plastic is unforgiving.

The thing is, even though it's closed, plenty of people from the nearby villages still go there to dump things, either to avoid paying the fee or because the truck only comes by once in a great while.

They call it an illegal dump, but everyone knows about it, and nobody lifts a finger.