A Homeless Guy and Some Dead Chicken
Finding a series of dead chickens in the dumpster was bad enough. But Reddit user GolfPr0 was startled when a live human suddenly jumped out of one of the garbage containers.
“In my younger days I owned a large waste hauling company. Tons of stories over a 20 year career.
Scariest: When I first started I would run the routes if someone needed off or was sick. I was running our front end loader one night and was dumping a McDonalds at 2:30 in the morning. After I opened the gate I climbed back in my truck and was just starting to raise the can to dump it and a very surprised homeless guy jumped out of the container.
Had it been another half second I wouldn’t have seen him, as he would have been out of my sight line, and he would have been dumped and compacted. We hauled some chicken farms and butcher shops so you always had dead animals to contend with. Nothing like starting the day dumping 40 cy of dead chickens.
Free Stuff: all the time. Our company did a lot of specialty work. One time we were contracted to get rid of 20 trailer loads of leather furniture, because it had mold on some pieces. Everyone at work that day got a free leather sofa and loveseat.
We also hauled a nationwide coffee roaster. FDA is pretty nasty. So we would get perfectly good packaged coffee all the time. If even the shrink wrap was damaged, they would throw out a whole skid. I don’t think we ever paid for coffee. Almost everyday, someone was coming in with something. We also did all the USPS locations. If you wrote “return to sender” on most stuff it went into the dumpster. I had over 10,000 cd’s from Columbia House at one point.
We do alot of estate cleanups (when someone’s parents die) The parents typically save all this stuff thinking their kids will want it one day, but they don’t. By the time mom and dad die, the kids are 60 ish and have all the stuff they need.
They usually just throw out all that stuff and sell the house for whatever money is left. In their haste they throw out alot of good stuff. When dumping a load one day a small wooden box opened up and was filled with about 50 silver dollars form 1922. I still use one today to mark my ball in golf.”