They Told
Me. I
Didn't Listen.

The week before your first day, they post a list. Your name is on it next to a garage. That moment — reading your name, seeing which garage — is the first real exhale since you started this whole process. You made it through the test, the physical, the wait. Now there's a location. A reporting date. Something concrete.

If you're lucky, you recognize another name on that list from training. Someone from Floyd Bennett. Someone you stood next to for four weeks. I was lucky. There were twelve of us from the same class going to the same garage. I would've been fine with just one familiar face. Twelve felt like a gift.

They'll tell you to go to the garage a few days before you start. Introduce yourself to the clerk. Fill out paperwork. See the parking situation. See what the drive looks like. Do it if you can. Not everyone does. The job starts whether you've done your homework or not.

First morning. You sign in. And then you wait.

There's a board. Your name is on it. They spent a whole day on it at Floyd Bennett — how it works, how moves get made, the whole system. You understood it in a classroom. In real time, with names moving fast and people working it like a language you just started learning, it's a different thing. First day, you're not trying to make moves anyway. You let your name land. You watch. You learn the rhythm before you start trying to work it — because if you reach for something you can't make yet, everyone in that garage knows it.

What I didn't understand until later was what was actually going on across the garage. The new guys were on one side. The OGs were huddled near the office door, going in and out, having conversations I couldn't hear. They were making moves on the board.

So the OGs were negotiating — figuring out which one of the twelve they were stuck with for the day and making the best of it. I didn't know any of this was happening while it happened. I found out after. What I know is I ended up with the hardest worker in that garage on my first day, and I had no idea what I'd just walked into.

It was early September. Still in t-shirts. We drove to the route and I realized I'd left my gloves in the car. We were already five blocks from the garage. Going back wasn't even a conversation. You don't ask to go back. Not on the first day. Not with this partner.

He handed me his gloves without a word. And he worked barehanded the whole route.

I didn't fully understand what that meant until I'd been on the job long enough to know what the job asks of your hands. He gave me his protection and didn't replace it. Didn't say anything about it. Didn't mention it again. Just kept moving.

That was my first lesson. Not from a manual. Not from training at Floyd Bennett. From a man who handed a stranger his gloves on a September morning and got back to work like it was nothing.

One more thing about that first day — and you'll understand this more as you go. There are two schools of thought on this job. There are workers who run the route hard and fast, get it done, and bank as much time at the end of the day as the job allows. And there are workers who go steady, protect their bodies and protect their route, and treat it like a normal day that ends at sign-out. Work like a gentleman, they call it.

Both sides think the other side is doing it wrong. The runners say the gentlemen are out on the street actually working longer than they have to be. The gentlemen say the runners are burning their bodies out. Both sides have a point. This debate has been going on longer than either of us has been on the job.

I didn't get to choose which school I was trained into. My first partner ran. So I ran. That shaped everything about how I learned this job. Your first partner will shape you too — probably before you even realize it's happening.

Pay attention to who you're working with in the beginning. Not just what they do. How they think. That's the education they don't give you at Floyd Bennett.

I came from sports. My whole life. I knew how to put my head down, grind through discomfort, and keep moving when my body was telling me to stop. That background saved me on day one. But it didn't prepare me for what the job actually asked.

This wasn't conditioning. This was a completely different kind of load. New movements. New timing. New demands on muscles you didn't know you had. Being athletic got me through the day. It didn't make the day easy.

The movements are awkward at first — not because they're complicated, but because they're specific. There's a technique to everything. The way you grab a bag. The way you drag a sausage bag — long compacted bags made by building compactors, sometimes four feet of dense, tightly packed waste — between parked cars and transition into the throw. The timing of each step with your partner. When you don't have the timing yet it feels like learning to shoot a layup and going up on the wrong foot every single time. You know something is off. You can't fix it yet. You just keep going.

My partner that day was throwing sausage bags over cars like they were nothing. I'm talking about solid dead weight — four feet long, dense enough to make you reconsider your life choices — and he was moving them like they were empty. I was assisting his lifts when we threw together. He wasn't waiting for me to figure it out. He was just moving and I was catching up.

Here's what nobody tells you about the physical side of this job: strength alone isn't the answer. Raw strength will get you through the first few weeks but it will also destroy you if that's all you're using. The guys who last on this job figured out how to use momentum. How to let the weight work with you instead of against you. How to move efficiently so that the tonnage doesn't feel as heavy by the end of the route.

I was working too hard. Lifting with muscle instead of mechanics. That's a beginner mistake and it's one almost every new person makes regardless of how strong they are. You'll make it too. The goal is to recognize it as fast as possible and start watching the veterans for how they actually move — not just how fast they move.

There's a difference between a strong worker and an efficient worker. Strong workers burn out. Efficient workers are still doing this job twenty years later.

Recover like it's part of the job. Because it is. Eat right. Sleep. Treat your body like an athlete in season — because that's exactly what you are. The workers who fall apart on this job are almost always the ones who stopped treating recovery seriously. They figured the body would just keep absorbing it. It doesn't. Not forever.

You're going to be sore in places you've never been sore. Your hands, your lower back, your shoulders in a specific way that no gym exercise produces. That soreness is normal. Persistent pain is different. Know the difference and don't ignore the second one.

The physical reality of this job is manageable. Thousands of people have done it for full careers. But it requires respect — for the weight, for the mechanics, for your own body. Come in thinking you can muscle through everything and the job will correct you. Come in ready to learn how to move and you'll find your footing faster than you think.

Driving a sanitation truck in New York City is not like driving anything else. The size of the vehicle, the blind spots, the stop-and-go through streets that were never designed for something this big — none of that is what makes it hard. What makes it hard is everything happening around the truck at the same time.

The mirrors are your lifeline. There are more of them than you're used to and none of them give you a complete picture. You have to build a habit of cycling through all of them constantly — not when you think you need to, but as a baseline rhythm that never stops. You're looking for things before they become problems. A person stepping off the curb two stops ahead. A car door that's about to open. Someone who sees the truck and decides they're going to beat you to their car before you block them in.

Your foot never fully leaves the brake. Not in the city. Not on a route. You're always hovering — ready for the last-second door flung open, the person who darts into the street, the car that pulls out of a spot without looking. You can't react to those things at full speed. You have to already be slowing down before they happen. That awareness is a skill. It takes time to build and you don't get to skip the building.

While you're managing all of that, you're also managing your partner. He's outside the truck working. You're watching him in the mirror — is he clear, does he need help, is he finished, can I move up. You are responsible for him the same way he's responsible for you. That's not a figure of speech. If something happens to your partner because you moved the truck at the wrong moment, you have to live with that. Nobody on this job takes that lightly.

In BK13 most of the streets were narrow enough that cars couldn't get around the truck. That's actually a protection. When the street is wide enough for someone to pass, some of them will try — no concern for the worker standing in the middle of the road. Your life is never as important as their destination. That's just the reality of the job.

I was taught to block the street when it was wide enough for someone to get around. If it's a choice between someone waiting a few extra minutes to get off the block and your partner getting clipped by a car trying to squeeze through — there's no choice. Block the street. Your number one priority is getting yourself and your partner home in one piece at the end of the day. Everything else comes after that.

One more thing about being out there that not enough new workers think about — you are always being recorded. Dash cams. Ring cams. Business cameras. NYC traffic and street cameras. People filming on their phones. Someone is always watching, and anything you do on that route can end up on Twitter or Facebook before you get back to the garage. Carry yourself accordingly. The way you handle a difficult resident, the way you move around someone's car, the way you respond when something goes wrong — all of it is potentially on camera.

You don't have to be perfect. You have to be honest and carry yourself to a standard of basic respect — for the public, for the job, for your coworkers who end up in the frame with you. One bad moment that goes viral doesn't just follow you. It follows everyone in that garage.

Now let's talk about the trucks.

At Floyd Bennett they told us to put together a work bag. Tools. Bungee cords. A few extra nuts and bolts. Basic stuff. In my garage carrying a bag was looked down upon so I never did it. That was a quick lesson. You get to the route, you open the doors, and the latch that holds them open is broken. No bungee cord. You make do with rope you find on the street or a garbage bag tied around the handle. You adapt.

The trucks are used by different crews every day. Nobody feels like it's their truck to maintain. There are never enough mechanics or garage utility spots to fix everything that needs fixing. So things stay broken longer than they should.

This isn't a complaint. It's a heads up. Know your truck before you move it. Do a walk-around. Check what works and what doesn't. The truck will tell you what it needs if you pay attention before you're already on the highway finding out the hard way.

The mental load of driving this job is real. People underestimate it because it doesn't look like physical work from the outside. But at the end of a driving day you are tired in a different way than a loading day — it's the kind of tired that comes from sustained focus and the weight of knowing that one lapse matters. Respect that. Give yourself time to decompress after. The route ends when you park the truck. Let your mind end with it.

If a plumber was working in your house, you'd say good morning. If someone was fixing your car in your driveway, you'd at least nod. That's basic human behavior. But something changes when the person outside is a sanitation worker. Some people develop a kind of selective blindness. They run out, drop a bag at the curb while you're pulling up, and disappear back inside before you can make eye contact. Others watch from behind their curtains — lights off, thinking you can't see them. Sometimes the lights are on. You can always see them.

This is the culture you're walking into. Most of New York City will treat you like part of the infrastructure — necessary, invisible, not quite human enough to acknowledge. You need to decide early how you're going to carry that. Because it will either wear you down or it won't, and that's largely up to you.

Some workers take a different approach — a proactive one. You get to a stop before someone can disappear back inside and you hit them with a good morning first. A wave to the person behind the window. You're there for thirty seconds to two minutes. You treat it like you're a customer service associate and they're standing in front of you — because technically they are. Some people warm up to that. They start coming out. They start saying thank you. You humanize yourself before they can make you invisible. Other people you will never reach no matter what you do. Accept that and keep moving.

Then there's the other side of the culture — what people actually put out for you to pick up.

Someone renovates their whole house and brings the debris to the curb untied. Nails sticking out. Broken glass barely inside a torn bag. A garbage pail packed solid with dirt that takes three people to lift. The attitude behind it is real: "I brought it out here, you can handle it." Yeah. You have to do this five or six days a week. That was their one project for the year — sometimes the past ten years. The imbalance doesn't register for them.

There are rules that are supposed to protect you from this. Most people don't know the rules exist. Some know and don't care. You'll learn what you're required to take and what you're not. Learn it early. You don't have to destroy your body over someone else's renovation because they couldn't be bothered to follow the guidelines.

Now the one that can't wait for someone to figure it out on their own.

Needles in the trash. Loose. No container. Just dropped in a bag with everything else.

It happens constantly — drug users, diabetics, healthcare workers who know better and do it anyway. Guys get stuck. They go to the hospital, they get post-exposure treatment, and the medication makes them sick. I've known a lot of workers who've been through it. Someone I work with went through it recently.

To anyone reading this who isn't a sanitation worker — if you use needles for any reason, diabetes, medication, anything — there are safe disposal containers at pharmacies across New York City. Most are free. A loose needle in a garbage bag is not a gray area. It is a hazard that puts a real person at real risk every single time. That person has a family. They're trying to go home in one piece. Do better.

The last culture note — street cleaning.

You'll do cleaning shifts where you're walking a block with a broom and a wheeled pail, sweeping everything up. People will see you coming and start cleaning out their cars onto the sidewalk for you to sweep up. Just dumping their garbage directly in your path as you approach.

I learned to walk around those piles. Not because I was above picking them up — but because engaging with it every single time was a fast road to losing your mind. You pick your battles on this job. The piles will always be there. Your sanity is worth protecting.

The culture of this job asks a lot of you that nobody warned you about. The physical load is visible. The mental and emotional load of being invisible in a city you help keep running — that one sneaks up on you. Acknowledge it. Don't let it sit unexamined. And find the approach that lets you show up the next day without carrying yesterday's weight with you.

This job comes with a pension. That's real and it matters — don't take it for granted. But the pension alone is not a retirement plan anymore. Not for workers hired after April 1, 2012. The system has changed in ways that most new workers don't fully understand until it's too late to do much about it.

Here's what you need to know going in.

If you were hired after April 1, 2012, you are in the Tier 3 Revised 22-Year Plan. That means full retirement after 22 years of service — two more years than workers hired before 2012 needed. That gap matters when your body is telling you it's done.

There is also a social security offset built into your pension. When you reach retirement age and start collecting Social Security, the city reduces your pension by 50% of your Social Security benefit. Workers hired before 2012 don't have this offset. You do. There are bills in Albany right now trying to eliminate it — but as of today it is the law, and you need to plan around it, not hope it goes away.

Overtime is also capped for pension purposes. The hours you grind out, the extra shifts, the years of putting in more than required — most of that overtime will not count toward your pension calculation beyond a specific annual ceiling. The pension is calculated on your base earnings, not everything you actually made.

Start your 457 deferred compensation account immediately. Day one if you can. Even 1%. That's it — just 1% of your paycheck going in automatically. Every time you get a raise, bump it up a little. Keep doing that until you hit the annual maximum. You will not miss the money the way you think you will. What you will notice is what happens to it over 20 years of compounding. By the time you retire you will have built something real that your pension alone would not have given you.

The 457 is through the NYC Deferred Compensation Plan. It comes out of your paycheck before taxes. It grows tax-deferred. You control it. Set it up through your agency and leave it alone. The only mistake worse than starting late is never starting.

Now the part that goes beyond the paycheck.

This job is one that you get to leave at the door. Route is done, truck is parked, you stop thinking about it. No deadlines following you home, no calls from a supervisor asking questions only you can answer. That is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable. But it also means the mental energy you have after the shift is yours to use — and a lot of people waste it.

Use your off-duty hours to build something. A skill. A side business. A hobby that could become income. Whatever it is that you've been telling yourself you'll get to when you have more time. You have the time now. The shift ends and the rest of the day is yours. That is the trade this job offers. Most people don't take it seriously until the job starts breaking their body and they realize they need an exit that isn't built yet.

The workers I've seen struggle most after retirement are the ones who had nothing outside the job. Their whole identity was the route and the garage and the guys they worked with. When that ended there was nothing to step into. Don't let that be you.

Recover like an athlete. Eat right. Sleep. Treat your body with the same discipline you'd give it if you were being paid to perform — because you are. The workers who last on this job and leave it standing upright are the ones who respected the recovery as much as the work.

You don't have to figure out your whole second act on day one. But start something. Learn something new. Put 1% in the 457. Make one decision today that your retired self will be grateful for. The time passes whether you use it or not.

A few years into my career one of the shop stewards — a huge man, fast and efficient, someone who had clearly mastered everything this job asks of you — pulled together a group of guys I came on with. Most of them had taken special spots early. Easier assignments. They hadn't spent much time on the collection truck. He wanted to test what they knew.

The question was simple. You pull up to a stop. There are four bags and two pails. How do you get it all to the truck?

I knew the answer immediately. I watched as the others gave different answers — none of them wrong exactly, just not efficient. The answer is: throw the four bags first, then drag the two pails. Bags move faster. You sequence it so nothing is waiting on anything else.

The guys who hadn't worked the truck didn't have those answers. Not because they weren't capable — but because you can't learn sequencing from a classroom. You learn it from repetition. From standing at stop after stop until it becomes automatic. From watching someone who already has it figured out and paying close enough attention to understand why they're doing what they're doing — not just copying the motion.

Cutting a route is the other skill that separates workers. It sounds simple — it isn't.

A route is a puzzle. The goal is to get the most work done while driving the least amount of distance. Not everything is a perfect grid. You have dead ends, cut-throughs, one-way streets, two-way streets, blocks that look connected on paper and aren't. The wrong sequence means doubling back, circling the block, wasting time and fuel and energy on movement that didn't move any garbage.

Routes come with maps now, which helps. When I started, you followed someone who knew the area and you learned it by doing it. Once I knew a neighborhood well enough I started making small adjustments — tweaks that felt more efficient for how my partner and I moved together. Then when I could pull up a map on my phone, everything changed. I could go to any neighborhood in the city and cut the route like I'd worked it for years.

It's a transferable skill. Think of it the way a contractor or a roofer thinks about their work — the same principles apply to every house regardless of how the house looks. Different layout, same logic. Once you internalize the logic of how a route works, the specific streets stop mattering. You read the map, you find the pattern, you move.

Watch the OGs. Not just what they do — why they do it. They're not going to slow down and explain it. They're going to do it and you're going to have to catch on. That's how knowledge transfers on this job. It always has been.

One rule I heard constantly in my first year: never pass garbage. If you're going around the block or cutting to another section of the route and you happen to pass a small piece of work that belongs to a line you'll hit later — do it now. Don't wait. Yes, you'll still drive by it again. But later in the route is when that small break makes the real difference. The work you knocked out early is weight you're not carrying at the end of the day.

The workers who are genuinely good at this job approach every new route as a learning opportunity. Every new partner teaches you something. Every neighborhood has its own rhythm. The people who've been doing this for twenty years and are still sharp — they never stopped paying attention. They just got better at knowing what to pay attention to.

One last thing — and this goes back to the two schools of thought from Chapter 1. Neither way is wrong. Workers who run the route and workers who go steady both have their reasons and both can be excellent at what they do. The trick is finding a partner who works the same way you do. That's where the real friction comes from on this job — not the garbage, not the hours, not the truck. It's the stubborn guys who can't adapt to anyone else's rhythm and won't even try. Don't be that person. Know how you work. Find someone who matches it. And stay open enough that you can get through a day with anyone when you have to.

That's it. Six chapters. They tried to tell me most of this at Floyd Bennett Field. I wasn't listening. Now you've heard it twice. Get to work.