There is an
captivating piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Life
Among the ‘Garbage Faeries,’ by Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence
with the New York City Department of Transportation
(there’s an interesting job—I’d
love to see Nagle’s business card).
The piece is a prelude to Nagle’s book coming out this month—Picking Up: On the Street and Behind the Trucks With the Sanitation Workers of New York City.(Don't laugh. She got published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)
Nagle talks about how these folks quickly discover that as sanitation workers they are invisible. They can do anything from leer at women to scavenge for mongo (sanitation slang for items of value rescued from the garbage—one fellow found a three-piece suite he had tailored and now hangs in his closet).
I can’t believe there isn’t a series of mystery novels based on a sanitation worker whose best tool is his invisibility. He solves major crimes—from murders to art thefts to kidnappings—because of his access to the city’s underbelly through its trash cans.
The article is worth checking out, if nothing else but for the glossary of New York sanitation worker slang. For instance a Tiffany is a particularly neat and tidy job, as in, “He did a real Tiffany on that street.”
I know a woman named Tiffany. I am not sure she would appreciate the tribute.
See ya’ later.
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