freakpirate

As an employee at a recycling company I move a lot of empty cans and bottles around. All of the empties we collect get dropped off at the bottle depot in downtown Calgary. It is not a great place to spend a lot of time. First of all, hauling 65 gallon bins full of empty wine bottles is not fun. They are heavy and I am still a fairly out of shape, weak little man. But I'm making slow improvement on that front. Second, it stinks. But so does the truck I drive and so do a lot of the other things we pick up.

The biggest problem is the people. The downtown bottle depot is the main stop for a large percentage of the city's homeless population. I don't have anything against homeless people. What I do have a problem with is people who bother me constantly when I am trying to work. Today there were two incredibly intoxicated men hanging around our truck while we were unloading it. They asked for bottles (which is fairly common) and we politely said no and went about our work. Five minutes later they were back asking for bottles again. Again, we said no. A few minutes after that one of them came back holding a broken bicycle pump like a gun, pretending to hold us up for a bag of empty milk cartons. For some reason he thought this was the funniest thing it the world and continued to do it for 45 fucking minutes. As we were leaving his friend was running up and down the alley throwing shopping carts around and threatening to kill someone because "someone stole his shit".

Despite all of this (and some other minor annoyances) the new job has been decent so far. And my car gets to stay parked most of the day. And the pay is pretty good. I will probably stick with it for now.