While the wife was making a cake for a wedding in Tucson, I was lying in our friends soon to be marital bed with my sleeping daughter. Since we had no sound machine with us to encourage her sleeping state to continue I turned to the clock radio and found the local NPR station where the show Hear and Now was just starting. Oddly enough the show featured a segment about an New York City Anthropologist that joined the Sanitary workers of NYC to study what trash say about us as a society.
The most familiar part of the show was where this woman who was acting as a garbage collector experienced the power of wearing safety yellow and remaining invisible to the public at large. You can listen to the program here, scroll down to the title "Garbage" and click on listen. That is, if you have time to kill or simply give a shit. Oh, sorry I couldn't post the sound file here but I am a garbage man not some asshole from tech support that can hack your iPhone on his lunch break in exchange for a red bull and your password to adultfriendfinder.com...
And after that, you can read an article from the New York Times here that talks about trash slang, most of which I am unfamiliar with but will be doing my best to work my new vocabulary into conversation with regular folks at the store, post office etc. to assist in making the days go by a bit stranger and or confusinger. (thats not in the article, but you can have it for free.)
In closing I would like to highlight a quote from the New York Times article that summarizes this job and the invisibility cloak that comes with it:
"There are only three moments when anyone notices us: if we make noise too early in the morning, if we block traffic, and if we don't show up.''
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