Happy Garbage Man Day! This may sound like a strange one but just imagine what the world would be like if you had to live without the services of your local, friendly garbage professional. There would be mountains of trash piled up outside every home and business, and the smell alone would put us back into lockdown. Fortunately, there is a group of tenacious and dedicated people with large payload trucks out there who periodically collect and dispose of your refuse. Although the modern garbage day pretty much looks like a guy playing a mobile arcade claw machine, some of you may remember when it was a guy hanging off the back of the truck who actually had to actually pick up those old school steel cans. Garbage Man Day, therefore, is a chance for everyone to stop whatever they are doing and spend a little time appreciating the hard work of these diligent souls. And it's not just the guys on the trucks but everyone throughout the entire disposal process, from collections to recycling, to landfills. With their help, cities can safely rid themselves of potentially dangerous and hazardous waste products and maintain public health. Plus a lot of that stuff can be safely recycled for use in new products or used for alternative energy sources, which helps the environment too. But it's not just about garbage men or other civil servants who keep our communities clean. Today has a broader opportunity to appreciate all those people who do things for us - whether we see them or not, or even know they exist - that help make our lives better. Without diminishing any of us individually, I think it's fair in many ways to say that we are all just tiny cogs of a giant machine. Let's call this machine society. Some of our cogs may be relatively bigger or smaller than others but without the wide variety of cogs doing their part the whole machine would grind to a halt. There are many things we enjoy in our lives each day, week, or month that we take for granted and pay little mind too, even if we peripherally catch a glimpse of them in action. When you walk into a grocery store those shelves were not fully stocked by themselves; your mail and packages don't just magically appear at your house; even turning on the tap to fill a glass of water has a lot more behind it than you may think. We gladly reap these benefits and rarely reflect on everything that goes into what it takes to make it all happen. Even when we do see a store clerk stocking shelves, or the postal jeeps zipping around, or a road getting torn up to lay new utilities we more often than not just take them as a matter of course or dismiss it as just someone doing their job or even get upset for having traffic delays due to the construction. But these people are all provided valuable services to us, both large and small, and it's worth taking a moment to appreciate that. Consider how hard it would be to make a simple ham and cheese sandwich if you had to do it all yourself: grow the wheat, raise the pigs and cows, grow the vegetables; harvest the wheat, mill the flour, slaughter the pigs, milk the cows, make the cheese, pick the vegetables, bake the bread, make yourself a plate, pump water to wash that plate, walking to and from the farm, the miller, the garden, your house, etc., etc., etc. It's exhausting just typing out the tasks and I'm sure I forgot a few. After all that hard work, not to mention the months it would take, you'd be too tired to even eat that sandwich. In fact, you might even resent it. Instead with a 15 minute dash to the store you can pickup your bread, meat, and cheese, or just order it all online for same-day delivery, and have clean running water to wash up afterwards. If you take some time to think about it its all pretty amazing what we enjoy today. And there's are thousands and thousands of people behind the scenes that make it all possible.
