SIDE DOOR PICKUP: A BUNCH OF GARBAGE

by Howard Melamed

Now that the City of Coral Springs collects money for garbage and we can’t complain to Southern Sanitation, side door pickup is now a bunch of garbage.

Southern Sanitations contract requires them to bring the 2 garbage cans beside your side door to the street every time there is garbage collection and then bring them back. It is something that the city commissions negotiated as one of those  “Perks'” for having southern sanitation have exclusive right to our garbage.  The problem is that Southern Sanitation does not honor this contract clause with everyone, unless you  harass them on a daily basis.  This is not fair! Especially now that my wife has given me the responsibility of moving the garbage cans to the street and back again. It was ok when she was doing it. Now, she has done me a favor ( and you) by making me more sensitive to this issue.

Let’s go through the process:  2 times a week Southern Sanitation picks up the garbage.  2 times a week they are supposed to have workers go around to all the residential property owners and move the garbage cans from the side door of your house to the street. They pick up the garbage. Workers from Southern Sanitization then are supposed to take the garbage cans and place them back beside your side door. Simple function.

Here’s the math:  Let’s say that there are 35,000 homes in Coral Springs. At 2 pickups per week, that means that they need 70,000 pickups. Each pickup requires 1 worker to go to the side door to move the cans. Being conservative, it takes a worker 1 minute  to move the cans to the front and then go to the next house. Another 1 minute, sometime  later that day  to get the cans back to the side door. That’s 2 minutes per pickup.

35,000 * 2 minutes  = 140,000 minutes. /  60 minutes/hour / 40 hours per week / 1 man /week = 58 workers.

Ok. 58 workers costs = $15 per hour with all the benefits. which equals $34,800 ( includes benefits I hope) per week.  52 weeks of this equals $1,800,600.  That’s a lot of money Southern Sanitation is saving by having schmucks like me move the garbage cans instead of them.

Let’s ask Southern Sanitation not to perform this function ( I will do my own garbage moving from the side door to the street), and ask them to reduce our garbage bill by $1,800,600  or $51 per house hold retroactive to the time they entered into this contract. 

Alternately, they can call up my wife and ask her to please take back this responsibility from me, and promise to do side door pickup. This way I can ‘waste’ my time writing more articles instead of moving garbage!

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Author: HelpMeHoward