We are counting on you

On one of our weekend rides I had confessed to my friend Karl that I wanted a Pedometer to measure just how many steps I take in a given work day. Weeks pass and two of them show up on my mail box. they were pretty basic, only measuring the amount of steps that one takes and not the distance or speed of which. I was pumped!

By the time I got my act together it was Monday (a day that is reserved for being fucked in our field and pretty much any other one) and they put me on a route that most floaters fear to do alone or even with the guy who's route it is. they call him the animal. He is over weight, dirty and appears to never wear gloves. Did I mention that he runs for his entire shift? When they give him and extra man he yells at them to hurry it up and cusses at them in Spanish.

So, back to the pedometer. I put it on when I was getting dressed in the morning and it began to count steps from then on out. By the time I dropped my pants at the yard to make sure I had emptied the contents of my soul before I find myself in a nasty situation in someones garage where the only option is an over sized coffee can I had already taken 595 steps. Amid the confusion of getting the shaft on this route I had forgotten that I had been wearing the pedometer until an hour into the route, sweating in the pre-dawn light and breathing heavily I looked down at my belt to see where I was step-wise only to find that I had lost it in the hustle of cans. Pissed because I botched the experiment yet at the same time not pissed because I got it for free and had an extra one at home.

Fast forward in a very slow way to Thursday where I had been taken off routes that posed any sort of challenge or chance of getting off early and had been placed on a city can route that serves some of SOMA, all of Union Square and portions of Downtown via a small truck that I refer to as the Ice Cream truck, except you dont want to line up for what I got in the back of this rig... I had the pedometer in my coat pocket for the first few streets and remembered as I walked a few blocks from the truck with my collection can. Sure that this type of route (forced to stay out for 7 hours) was far less physical than one that collects residential trash with the option to go home once done I was confident that I would have a solid measurement of steps taken in a days work, or walk as the case may be.

With the small truck (ice cream truck) you can dash about town and pick up cans while the truck is parked next to them rather easily, due to its small size it does not block traffic or threaten to run over passers by.

So along I go working my way down Kearny St. when I ran into a friend who found himself in trouble a while back, we shot the shit while thr truck idled and then died, which means we were shit talking for more than 5 minutes (the truck has an auto kill timer on it) so I handed him a couple bucks for the sake of being friends at opposite ends of the spectrum and I made my way to service the cans that sit on the corners of Bush and Kearny. Upon my return the ice cream truck wouldn't turn over, just click click click. I tried turning off the battery switch and letting it sit for a bit. Once that did not work I called the shop for a jump and a professional assesment of what the fuck. After the jump the mechanic said good bye and left me to finish wrapping up downtown before lunch time. The truck dies again and I have to get another jump on the same block, only this time instead of saying bye he says in his thick Italian style that I have to drive back to the shop, he will follow me and that I need a different truck all together. This sucks for me because we have 3 brand new ice cream trucks on hand yet non of them are ready to start servicing, what ever that means.... that leave me with a regular rear loader that needs to be guided throughout downtown and Union Square at lunch time. That means people, lots of people. Folks are so selfish with their lunch hour (understandably so) that they will not give you an inch of room, be it on street or sidewalk.

Now back on the road with a full sized regular assed garbage truck that has right side drive I coach and calm myself with this mantra "Slow while in the truck, run like hell while out of the truck.". I become a hawk, seeing spots that I can park the beast while I service x-amount of cans then dump my collection can (or pack can as they used to say) and walk on in a separate direction to service more cans. The goal was to walk more, drive less.

At this point I was more concerned with not killing people yet working efficiently enough to get done with the entire route in the allocated 7 hours than I was with the fact that I had been wearing a pedometer.

Once the truck was dumped and parked back at the yard I took off the pedometer to see where I was in the column of steps taken. Much to my surprise I had taken 22,187 steps through the course of the work. Now this day was different in the way that I was using a mobile death machine that travels the very same streets but only at night due to the over crowding, and I walked much more than I imagine I would normally.

On Friday I hoped that the truck would be fixed and I can get an idea of how many steps I would take when using the right truck for the job. I made no attempt to walk more or less, just be efficient and get done within the 7 hours and read The Onion
while I eat a sandwich in a shady alley that hopefully does not smell of urine. So once the truck was dumped and parked I looked down at my belted region to see 16,498 looking back at me. I was dissapointed that I had not walked as much as the day before almost, well not almost, exactly 5689 steps less.

Now according to Wikipedia a person with a healthy or active lifestyle takes on average of 10,000 steps a day. I don't make any claims about what kind of person category I fall into, other than maybe the "a little doughy" category, but I smashed the active lifestyle number be a few and now it was time time to drink some beer and walk laps around the living room in soft soft slippers while the little one slept and wait for the same to come for myself.

Now in closure I want you to glance up at the picture of the cat and wonder just how it was that this image showed up while doing an image search for a pedometer...