Garbo

When I lived in Australia, I learned that garbage collectors are called “garbos” in keeping with the longstanding twee Aussie custom of shortening names and nouns and adding either “o,” “ie,” or some variation of “ez.”

Hence in Australia, a garbage man is a garbo, an afternoon is an arvo, postmen are posties, a guy named Jeremy is Jez or Jezza….you get the picture. Aussies (you see how it goes?) love their chatty slang.

This is how Australian garbage collectors got their rather glamorous nickname, which suits the Aussies fine because they also love ironic titles.

In Los Angeles, we call garbage collectors “sanitation workers.” Their trucks have automated forklifts so the entire pick-up process requires only one person–the driver–and he never needs to leave the cab.

But in Montréal, the City doesn’t have the dough for fancy robot trash trucks. That money goes towards the intense snow-removal operations that happen throughout the winter.

As a result, trash day in MTL is old school, and delightfully so.

The French word for “garbage man” is éboueur, and gotta say: these guys are impressive. Crews of éboueurs throw every item into the back of a smasher truck by hand. On Moving Day, when the streets of the city are strewn with heaps of discarded furniture and boxes of who-knows-what, a couple extra guys are added to the crew to handle the increased load, but it’s still a fully manual operation.

Thing is, most éboueurs seem to enjoy the physicality of their work. I have seen crews that are a little less enthusiastic, maybe tired near the end of a shift, but usually when I see éboueurs they are jumping, singing, joking around, and apparently having a pretty good time.

I bet most people stereotype trash collection as a depressing job. Well…not in Québec, where they do things their own way and have fun at every opportunity–including walking around the city throwing other people’s garbage into trucks.

The éboueurs stay pretty fit lifting and chucking all that junk. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a “Hot Trash Men of Montréal” calendar floating around somewhere. It would be very popular in our neighborhood.