Note to self: if I become homeless, I’m not sleeping in any Dumpsters. If I need a place to sleep during the winter, I will go commit a minor crime and go to jail; at least they’ll give you a warm bed and 3 meals a day.
I think they should offer this poor guy a job with the Sanitation Department.
It’s not as bad as you’d think working for the Sanitation Department. It’s a decent job, actually. One of the perks is the huge number of things that you find. People throw away brand new things for tiny defects all the time, and put gently-used , perfectly functional items out on the curb when they start taking up too much space. Garbage collectors can frequently furnish their homes with all the stuff they find. A lot of the time there’s perfectly good furniture, decorative items, and useable scrap wood out there on the curb with the garbage. The Sanitation Department guys here have a whole weight room at the HQ made up of weights they’ve picked up on the job.
Unless you are a certain young aboriginal in Saskatoon, in which case they drive you out of the city and leave you in a field to die of exposure.
Come to think of it, Saskatoon was where I had a nasty compaction scare one winter. I was on the national ski team, and returning to Ontario from a week or so in the Rockies. My vehicle was a small rag-top, which towed a large wooden ski box trailer.
You can see where this is going.
I was bushed, and the wind was buffeting the Samurai and blowing up a lot of snow, so when I made it as far as Saskatoon, I pulled into a parking lot, crawled into my sleeping bag in the ski box, and start sawing logs. In the middle of the night, I was woken by the loud sound of a garbge truck compacting a load, I felt some buffeting, and found a pile of something on top of me. Not rembering that I was tucked away in my ski box, or realizing that the buffeting from the wind had shifted some skis on top of me, I immediately assumed that I was in a dumpster bin and was being compacted.
I had never been so terrified in my life, and I screamed and thrashed for about a minute until I woke up enough to realize that is was just a garbage truck compacting beside my vehicle, rather than compacting me.
I have a friend in NJ who worked as a garbage man. Not the brightest bulb. Jumped in one day to loosen something that was stuck. Took him years to recover and we really didn’t think he would.