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January 1 , 2007

My first visit to the Palo Alto landfill, I was a little overwhelmed. The stench, the screaming gulls, the roaring compactors, the sense of having wandered into a different world with different rules than the ones that govern life in the spit-and-polish community it's attached to the underside of—all those things are a little disorienting. And I saw a fat pheasant running through the weeds, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the whole experience.

A man in his late thirties directed the traffic, which mostly consisted of pickups with small crews pitching the contents of other people's attics and garden sheds.

I had often thought about really bad jobs, having had a few not-so-stellar ones myself, and to that moment museum guards topped the list. Imagine the boredom of standing around for eight hours a day, five days a week, with nothing to do to pass the time. But when I saw the traffic director on the dump, in his orange overalls and leaning on his rake, occasionally showing someone how and where to back up to the working face, he instantly shot to first place on the list. Imagine the boredom of standing around for eight hours a day, five days a week, with nothing to do to pass the time—on top of a garbage dump.

"Man," I said to him, "what a job!" He gave me a broad smile and said, "I love this job! I LOVE this job!" But the next time I visited, he wasn't there. Nor have I seen him again in all the years since then.

Marijke Rijsberman