The View From the Scrapyard
I am gainfully employed in the Waste, Recycling and Scrap-metal Industry. Or, as the title implies – I work in a scrapyard. And please note, my dear Reader that the term gainfully is in serious want of redefinition.
My one brother-in-law was mildly amazed when I told some folks at a recent braai what I do all day for my garbage salary. He probably figured I wield a threadbare broom or push a mostly perforated wheelbarrow around quietly in a semi-deserted yard full of rows and rows of gently rotting old cars each in lots of mangled, spindled and badly mutilated little bits and pieces ... quietly bleeding rust, like my wobbling hypothetical wheelbarrow and soul.
Since we do chop up and process the odd car, truck, combine harvester, hammermeul, cannibalistic forklift and extremely dead tractor or two, and, this has been simmering away in the back of certain grey stuff as a self-commissioned and possible ongoing writing project, coupled with the fact that we regularly get totally clueless students and the odd shell-shlocked middle-to-upper-class lady or three popping in (and popping back out as fast as humanly possible) questing to find out: How Recycling Really Works? - I figured my day-job is a real cool, informative topic to blog and maybe rant about almost nicely.
Consider, please: a well balanced modern woman living in a highly secure, brightly sanitized piece of African Heaven - who finds time and some deeply obscure economic urge to stuff her upmarket car to the roof and bulging boot with R9.47’s worth of glass, cardboard and various shades and thicknesses of washed and neatly rinsed OCD plastic. This same (previously) good woman then carts this load all the way down to us on a weird fact-finding mission which obviously goes horribly wrong; yet, it must be said - exuding great heroic effort when she does eventually dump the whole dammed lot on our scale savagely.
Trust me; this is no mean feat even for a brawny alphadude.
To get to the scales she has to dodge a zipping, furiously whining impi of manic three-ton forklifts on tik, impervious massive steel trucks belching toxic smoky fumes with attitude and a bewildering array of angry battered bakkies towing even more badly beaten up trailers groaning with light-steel, PET and zany coloured varieties of Mitchell’s Plain common-mix paper and dodgy poly-prop - just in a bid to find utterly non-existent parking.
Then unload and wobble off on completely insensible shoes - to wage battle through a massive narrow mountainous valley of stench-ridden 1000-litre PET trash bags piled to the high steel rafters, stuffed with hideously unmentionable recyclables and infested with mangy rats and a wild throng of bergie-bakkies being violently shoved and mulishly dragged about by their road-enraged manky drivers - overloaded with everything except good common decent courtesy, manners, wood and rocks - only to then receive a little white receipt which she will cash in clearly visible distress at the front desk under a hastily mustered, almost-armed escort.
Enough to buy an ice-cold 500ml Coke from the gratuity fridge behind her with 50c change and an upcyclable bottle sans the mild caffeine jolt she just paid for, then immediately downed, to calm herself down, OR, alternately - a litre of poeswyn in a very re-used, currently Hepatitis and Tuberculosis-free jêm-blik plus a loose-êntjie with 40c change - in soiled unthinkable solidarity with the tattered and torn hypermarket-trolley bandits all lining up to argue and fiercely curse at the rear bullet-proof payout-window with their own little slips of white paper.
Even ... almost like a bank.
The corporately delinquent push-carters will tell you they are actually getting the better end of the shtick, which makes this something definitely worth splabbing about. Besides, you have to admire her courage and determination to even try - albeit only once.
And she was lucky on that one single occasion – they weren’t even disembarking The Tip.
Welcome to the bright, glittering Green-Industry. It’s an insanely visual, bog-like intellectual, desiccated sociological orgy of money and misplaced greed pouring out the bum of humanity - albeit only to the dedicated observer, and then only if you have absolutely no sense of smell, or toilet paper - like me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. I really and truly love it; lacerated corneas, severe burn wounds, cracked bones, nasty cuts, sadistic electrical shocks, haematomas, knife attacks, hijacking and violent armed robbery very much aside. I unequivocally hate my skint, trashy salary and I’m totally ambivalent about Himself – my tall, very skinny, naturally amphetamine-toxed skinty Boss to the point of being chronically bipolar by proxy. But I’m not going to get into Himself and the rest of the nefarious cast of hoodlums I work with and clash for cash and school-fees every other day. The fear, loathing, horrifying danger, granite-like ignorance, hysterical stupidity, quantum chaos and 5 litre buckets of bright pink hand-cleaner can wait till later.
What I love most about my job is the sheer ecstatic wonderment of:
What do People Throw in the Trash?
More importantly – why?
And why am I dreading tomorrow and can’t wait to get back to work in the morning?
Seriously, why?
If I’m not in it for the money, then there is only one other almost rational explanation:
Somehow, I’ve managed to browbeat myself into embracing my calling as an abysmally low-paid Zen priest of the Sacred Order of OPS (other people’s shit).
Or I’m just insane.
Call me baba or snot-for-brains. I answer to both.
It’s an almost comfortable truth. But only if you have no sense of smell. And some toilet paper. Got some?
I think I’m supposed to say amen, amzen or something else profoundly relevant at this point and pass the polished barren begging-bowl – but I don’t think I’m even allowed to confess to any of this on pain of excruciating and nasty employment martyrdom - so hold on to that snotty thought...