And Tuesday, pickup day, I got up at 4:30 like I have since Clinton, put on my boots, walked down to the corner where my route starts, and walked the whole thing on foot.
Eleven miles. No truck, no vest, no business being there.
I did not touch a can. I want that clear, because the city attorney asked. I walked my forty streets in the dark looking at cans, which is what that consultant called a social visit.
At six ten I was on Fig Street and Alina Kwiatkowski’s cans had not moved and her porch light was burning in daylight, which it does not, because she is eighty-six and she is careful about the bill.
I knocked. Then I went around the back and I could see her on the kitchen floor through the storm door.
She went down Sunday night. She was there about thirty-four hours. She is home now and she is using a walker and her son moved back from Allentown in April.
Here is the part that ended it, and it was not the ambulance and it was not the yard signs.
Our union rep is Dorene Machnik. She is sixty-one and she reads everything, which is rarer than you would think.
She read the whole consultant report. All of it, including the data appendix in the back that the council got in a binder and did not open, and there is a paragraph in the methodology section that the man wrote himself.
Note on Route 12: emergency medical calls originating from neighbor or route-personnel observation on these forty streets run 4.1 times the citywide rate. This is anomalous and is not explained by demographics. It has been excluded from the efficiency model as a non-quantifiable externality.
Four point one times. He measured it. He wrote it down. Then he took it out of the math and called me a legacy employee doing social visits on municipal time.
Dorene read that paragraph out loud at the council meeting on the eleventh and then she sat down and did not say anything else.
It got quiet in there.
The position came back on the eighteenth. Same route, back pay to Friday.
They did another thing I did not ask for. There is a form now. Route wellness contact, one page, and every crew in that city carries a pad. You fill one out when a can does not move two weeks running and it goes to the county aging office.
Two hundred and nine of them last year. I do not know how many of those were nothing and I am glad I do not.
The consultant firm still has the city contract. That is how it goes.
Mrs. Petrosky still ties her lids down and I still re-tie them, both knots, every week, and it takes me about nine seconds and it is on no form anywhere.
He called me the human element this department can no longer subsidize. He was right that it was the human element. He had already measured what it was worth and put the number in the back of his own report where nobody would read it, and then he took it out of the total.