Sludge, mud, guts and garbage.
It sounds gross and it might be dirty, but for people who sling
it, skin it, shovel it and skim it, it’s not as bad as you might
think.
People in the community who have jobs that many people may
consider to be
”
dirty
”
jobs get up every day to do the tasks that get taken for granted
many times by the rest of us.
Sludge, mud, guts and garbage.
It sounds gross and it might be dirty, but for people who sling it, skin it, shovel it and skim it, it’s not as bad as you might think.
People in the community who have jobs that many people may consider to be “dirty” jobs get up every day to do the tasks that get taken for granted many times by the rest of us.
Tom Gwinn – Garbage collector
Tom Gwinn has gotten up early every morning for the past two and a half years to begin his rounds as a garbage collector at Hollister Disposal Waste Management, Inc.
He swiftly makes his rounds, zipping from house to house, picking up garbage cans and dumping them into his lumbering truck.
“Most people think you’re going to get the garbage on you – that you’re going to get all muddy and dirty,” Gwinn said. “But I don’t really get anything on me because I’m in the truck most of the day.”
Advancements with the sanitation equipment have changed many aspects of the industry – enabling garbage collectors like Gwinn to pick up cans and bins with an automated claw by the push of a button – all from inside the cab of the truck.
After working as a stock room supervisor in Morgan Hill several years ago, Gwinn heard about the job from a friend who worked with the garbage company, he said.
After weighing the pros and cons, he decided to apply for a job and was pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
“You don’t grow up and say, oh I want to be in the garbage business, it’s not like that,” he said. “You kind of just come across it and give it a shot and it’s not so bad.”
Good pay and benefits, along with a job in town that eliminates a long commute balances out any negative aspects of the job, such as impatient drivers or insensitive comments, he said.
“There’s some people that I guess kind of look down on it – like you’re just a garbage guy,” he said. “I don’t take it too personal.”
Getting up early to do the route took some getting used to, but unlike the countless nine to fivers, he’s done by about 1 p.m. and is able to get a lot of things done with the rest of his day.
While he isn’t usually up to his elbows in other people’s trash, the general nature of the job brings with it some unpleasant experiences.
The scent of the landfill where he dumps his collection every day can be overwhelming, as can some of the riper cans he picks up, he said.
The odor of yard waste that has been sitting in a can for a while, especially when it gets wet, can waft into the truck and be foul.
“Just the smell alone will get you sometimes,” he said. “You have your lunch in your backpack and you smell some of the garbage and you’re like, ‘I’m going to wait until I eat.’ But you get used to it and it doesn’t bother me as much anymore.”
Other than the smell, one of the worst aspects of the job is cleaning out the inside of the truck, which he has to do often.
Garbage cans fall behind a blade that packs the garbage tightly into the truck, and when that happens the only way to get it out is to manually extract it with a shovel.
“By the time you get back there to clean it you can’t tell what it is – there’s mud, there’s water, there’s paper, there’s diapers – whatever it may be,” he said. “It’s not a lot, but five or six shovel loads that you have to throw out the side door is pretty bad.”
The less-appealing aspects of the job are many times dispelled from the intrigue of his 8-year-old son, he said.
“He loves the truck,” Gwinn said. “I’ll see them around town when I’m doing the route and he’ll be on his way to day-care, and he just wants to go inside it and check it out.”
Along with his son and a one-and-a-half year old daughter, his wife is too occupied with her own job and helping Gwinn raise a family to care much about the dirtier aspects of his job.
“She doesn’t have a problem with it,” he said. “As long as I take my shoes off before I go in the house.”
Dario Casarino – Waste Water Operator
For almost 18 years, Dario Casarino has been keeping the city’s waste water as clean as waste water could possibly be.
After hopes of a pro-football career were broken along with his neck, he came back to his hometown of Hollister and got a job with Bracewell Engineering in the waste water industry.
After 11 years with Bracewell, he then got a job with the city, of which this will be his seventh year, he said.
His duties include a little bit of everything at and around the city’s domestic and industrial waste water treatment plants on the west side of town.
Collecting data, measuring the oxygen in the water, collecting samples from the waste water ponds and performing maintenance duties are just a few of the tasks that make up his daily routine.
“You have to know what you’re doing,” he said. “If we’re not paying attention and the oxygen goes down, people usually call and complain, and say that it stinks. You have to keep on your toes and make sure things are up to our permit and everything.”
A mistake could lead to not only a foul odor, but fines, termination and even jail time in a serious situation, he said.
After years of working around sewage, most of the negative aspects many people would associate with the job don’t bother Casarino anymore.
“I like to be outside,” he said. “It may be a dirty job and people say, ‘What are you in – waste water, eew’ – but I enjoy it. It’s interesting and it keeps me happy.”
The waste water industry is currently one of the fastest growing industries, with many employers looking for treatment operators, he said.
“It’s a good field to get into,” he said. “Because it’s always flowing.”
Throughout his time as a waste water operator, Casarino has been privy to things someone with a desk job would never dream of encountering.
One day as he walked out of the office, he noticed an elderly couple standing at the edge of one of the treatment ponds. When he asked them what they were doing there, staring at the pond complete with spurting aerators and floating grease balls, they told him they were just taking a moment to enjoy the scenery.
“I said, but this is a waste water pond, and they said, ‘but it’s just so beautiful,'” Casarino said.
While the positive aspects include good pay and benefits, along with the solitude that many people dealing with the public can’t boast of, the negatives of the job can be somewhat disgusting at times.
“When you have to go out in the boat and stick your hands in the water to untangle wires from the aerators is one of the worst things,” he said. “You get wet and you get splashed – you have to make sure you wash all the time.”
One of the dirtiest tasks he ever had to do in his time as an operator was cutting a pipe that had become clogged. After they drained the pond to get to the pipe, they had to cut it to lessen the degree of the angle from 90 degrees to 45, he said.
“I jumped in and I started cutting and as soon as I broke through – the pipe’s full of water and raw sewage – it started spraying,” he said, chuckling. “So I just closed my mouth and went for it.”
Whether it’s simply collecting data or getting truly down and dirty, Casarino works hard at his job and takes it seriously because it’s an important part of the inner-workings of the city that can’t be forgotten, he said.
“I’m doing my best out here to try to keep the community happy,” he said. “We work for them.”
Doad Hext – Custom Ranch Butcher
His children were never allowed to watch “Friday the 13th” when they were growing up, but many times they ate their lunch surrounded by dripping blood and piles of guts.
Custom ranch butcher Doad Hext, a Los Banos resident, has been traversing the Central Coast for the past 32 years, slaughtering people’s animals for them.
Growing up on a ranch prepared Hext for the realities of life at an early age – making the killing process a very natural one that has never bothered him.
“You’re in mud, blood and everything else all day long – it’s just part of the job the way I look at it,” he said. “I get a lot of people who turn their noses up, saying, ‘Oh, it’s dirty.’ But you’ve got a hose there all the time so you wash your hands all the time. My hands are probably in more water than swimmers.”
As an independent ranch butcher, Hext travels to different jobs all over the surrounding areas. He’s usually up and out the door by 4 a.m. during the busy season and done no later than noon.
How much money he receives for a kill depends on the animal and where he has to go to butcher it.
In Hollister, Hext charges $75 to butcher a cow, plus he keeps the hides and sells them. After more than 30 years of perfecting his trade, he can shoot the animal, bleed it, skin it, gut it and split it in half in less than an hour.
“A lot of days I’m done by mid-morning and on a good day, I’ve made probably three times what a working man would make,” he said.
Many people don’t realize that custom ranch butchers still exist, and Hext concedes they are a dying breed.
When people want meat, they go to the store and buy it. They don’t appreciate that many people still raise their own meat and need people to slaughter it for them, Hext said.
“This mad cow deal – which is a big hype that should have never got hyped – hopefully it’s going to help us,” Hext said. “Because people are going to go back to raising their own animals for their own piece of mind.”
The phenomenon that was the mad cow scare was totally blown out of proportion, Hext said.
But the truth of the matter is that if you want to save money, go to the store and buy packaged meat on sale. If you want to know what you’re eating, raise it in your backyard and call a ranch butcher, he said.
“And then you’ve got 10 times better meat than you can buy,” he said.
As with any job, mistakes happen every once in a while, and in Hext’s profession, a slip up has profoundly different consequences than most jobs.
A mistake such as failing to kill an animal with the first shot can mean a lot of extra time spent just trying to catch the animal to kill it, especially if it’s in a large pasture.
And like any living thing that’s injured or scared, the noise they make isn’t going to be pleasant on the ears.
“If there’s a butcher says he hasn’t missed he’s lying,” Hext said. “So you do it again and you hope you get it done quick… if you miss on a pig they’re gonna squeal on you. They’re real vocal.”
When people find out what Hext does for a living, most of them are interested rather than repulsed. The most intently rapt audience he has are usually children, he said.
“I’ve pulled in places and kids know I’m coming, so they turn the TV off to come watch,” he said. “I have very few people that don’t watch it… If it’s going to bother a little kid, it’s after you shoot them and they’re still kicking – they can’t comprehend why they’re kicking. It’s just the electricity in the battery running out is what it amounts to.”
Between the very early mornings, the hauling, the sawing, the lifting and everything else Hext’s job duties consist of, there are times when he still wonders what he got himself into with this job.
But at the same time, he wouldn’t want to do anything else.
“You’re working for yourself,” Hext said. “You don’t answer to anybody but you… and you make a pretty good living.”
Henry Gonzales – Water Operator
We shower in it, drink it and play in it, but do we really know where it comes from and how it gets there?
Henry Gonzales, a water operator for the City of Hollister, knows all about water and doesn’t mind getting dirty to get it out clean.
Gonzales, who worked as a plumber before becoming certified as a water operator more than two years ago, has always been fascinated with the water works aspects of life, he said.
While it’s interesting to him, he concedes that at times, it’s physically exhausting and downright dirty.
If a water main breaks, the workers have to dig eight to 10 feet into the ground to find the leak, he said.
“It’s not a clean job, that’s for sure. We’re up to our hips in mud sometimes,” he said. “But on the flip side I also look at it that I get paid to play in the mud.”
Repairs and maintenance are only single aspects of Gonzales’ job, and anyone who may look down on him because he has a job that gets him dirty just doesn’t realize how important his position is, he said.
“Until you’ve done somebody else’s job, don’t ever take it for granted,” Gonzales said. “I don’t feel belittled by being in the hole and covered with mud. I actually feel privileged because I’m able to help out.”
Gonzales looks at his work not as just a job, but as a service to the community he’s lived in his entire life.
The appreciation and love of his job, even when he’s working in the dirt and rain, gives his life a true sense of fulfillment.
“When you have mud and water in your boots and down your shirt, it can (be gross), but you get cleaned off,” Gonzales said. “It brings a lot of pleasure to be able to work here and give back to the community and make sure where we live is safe.”
