Everyone loves Market Days. The food, the entertainment and the people watching were all good reasons you should have gone to the annual three-day festival last week. If you didn’t make it, there’s always next year.
But while you were out enjoying yourself, walking down the middle of Main Street without a care in the world, there was a lot going on to make sure Market Days lived up to the hype.
That includes trash duty. It’s not the most glamorous volunteer jobs out there, but someone had to do it. And that someone was us. We had thought about pouring beers in the hospitality tent, but suprisingly no too many people were ordering cold ones at 1 p.m. on a Friday.
So I hooked up with Bob Moses, who started doing trash duty three years ago, to get the lay of the land.
And it was pretty straight forward. We left the beer tent (without having a beer for the record) and headed north. The trash cans were set up in the median and we just had to basically walk up to them and use our best judgment. There were a few simple things on the checklist to see if it needed to be replaced with a fresh bag. First, we looked at how full it was. Then there was a little shake to see what kind of weight was in there. You also had to take into account what time of day it was.
Since this was right after lunch, and there were plenty of people walking around, you’d figure there would be a lot of action.
But fortunately and unfortunately, there weren’t many trash cans in need of changing. Fortunately because who wants to cart around a bunch of full trash bags on a hot day in June? Unfortunately because all of you probably would have wanted to read about us hauling around a bunch of smelly garbage on a hot day in June.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Moses had been on trash duty in the northern part of Market Days so we shook all the cans, grabbed piles of cardboard from vendors and moved some pizza boxes to the recycling, but only one bag to replace. It was about three quarters full, well above the threshold needed to be changed. If you let the bag get too full, let’s just say good luck getting it out of the can.
Once we emptied the cart at the Warren Street dumpster, we headed down south to sneak a peek at the rest of the trash spots.
In all, I was out there for a little shy of an hour and we got four bags and some recycling. It would have been six bags, but some city workers got to a couple cans just before we did on Pleasant Street.
We even got a ‘you’re doing a great job’ from a nice lady, who said she wouldn’t want to do it.
And of course I got an email from Moses saying that I missed all the action Friday night. Oh well, there’s always the opportunity to do it again next year.
