Late model street sweeping trucks cost $248,000 each and the City owns eight of them. The machines are repair nightmares, full of wearing parts, hydraulic parts, and as such they are tended to by a fleet of municipal mechanics who work 4:00pm to 2:00am five days a week. If your street is dirty when it’s supposed to be clean, a breakage is the probable cause. It is painfully clear from talking to Enzo and later, his supervisor, Peter, that the department is besieged each week not only by small mechanical failures but also constant complaints from us, the citizenry. People phone in, non-stop it would seem, to decry municipal street sweeping service operations. We complain that our own street has not been cleaned at all or not cleaned properly; that cars have not been ticketed when they were supposed to be ticketed or ticketed erroneously; that the sweepers are too loud and wake up those who most require quiet rest: seniors, young children, babies, their exhausted new parents; that the truck’s lights are too bright; that the trucks stink intolerably of diesel. On and on and on. The complaints pile up weekly, much in the manner of curbside dirt.
Each sweeper truck is equipped with a sophisticated GPS tracking device so the drivers are able to prove at least some of these grievances wrong with hard data.
But Enzo just wishes more people knew more about street sweeping. He wishes they could understand the many mechanical issues the crews face, about seasonal variation in the work (trucks fill up much faster in fall, for instance, when leaves are down and it takes Enzo longer to complete his routes then because the trucks can only hold 8.5 cubic feet of dirt and silt and trash before he has to go dump it down the former Africville Road in the North End at a landfill occupying one of the most pacific views in Halifax). He wishes that sharing such information would mean fewer attacks on his job performance.
Despite the bitter complaints and frequent breakdowns, Enzo has been performing his job for twenty years. Working for the City for thirty, in total. He graduated with a Commerce degree back when that actually meant something and he’s slightly ashamed of not having pursued a job in his field of study (economics). He's a private person and he doesn't like talking about himself, especially not his unused education. Near the end of my visit, he'll share that his supervisor asked all the operators to let me ridealong and no one wanted to. Enzo was pretty much voluntold. “I said no, and they ignored me,” he reports with a small smile.
Street sweeping is a decent job, from several angles. It’s a City job. Secure. There will always be streets and they will always get dirty. The pay is $22 an hour for permanent. And though they make good money, they don’t take home good money, as they like to say. The deductions are hefty, especially for pensions.
On the other hand, this is a terrible job. Repetitive and unfulfilling. You don’t develop new skills. You don’t grow as a person. You are doing a job that society underappreciates and would prefer to see fully automated. Compared to a giant Roomba, the humans performing street sweeping are inefficient and expensive.
Enzo says he simply fell into working for the City as a young guy and stuck with it. Above all, he is practical and unemotional about his three decades of service.
“I ended up staying here,” he says plainly. “And I’ll be 53 this year, I’m eligible to retire. But I’m not sure I will.” His tone matches the uncertainty of his words.
Many of the streets on Enzo’s Tuesday night route are ticketed, which means it’s urgent to complete those streets first, hopefully without breakdowns or unforeseen delays.
“It’s really important to get through those routes or people will be infuriated,” he notes, and falls silent to concentrate on operating the sweeper, inching along loudly and brightly at 15km/hr, studying his work in the deluxe double mirrors mounted on either side of the truck. Inside the cab there are dual steering wheels and dual brakes, enabling the drivers to switch over from left to right side drive to clean things like medians. The sweeper leaves a four foot wide symmetrical wet streak in its wake.
Enzo maneuvers around numerous illegally parked vehicles each night. Street sweepers don't ticket, that's Parking Enforcement's job and the two departments have no interaction. Enzo is able to report parked cars if they cause issues (like, say, if they are on fire) but generally they don't cause issues beyond being in the way.
How do you cope with - “The monotony?” Enzo finishes my question.
The City has arranged my ridealong with the understanding that I am a curious, empathetic independent journalist, all of which is patently true. But it’s not the entire truth. I am also highly selfishly interested in issues of work monotony, and withholding this feels essential for the most obvious of reasons: an awfully large proportion of work involves the worker maintaining the pretense that it is not as dull as it actually feels. At the very least, the worker must convey that the dullness is manageable.
The department is so eager to shed light on street sweeping operations that they never request to see my credentials. Wherever this writing ends up, in whatever form, it will please them for you (someone; anyone) to learn that a small crew of honest, hardworking men (incidentally they are all men) are committed to ridding your street of potentially hazardous obstructions while you dream various gauzy scenarios in your warm bed.
“It’s a job,” Enzo says, lightly. “It’s no different than a dentist working in someone’s mouth. Pretty much everyone, if you look at their job, it’s in some way mundane.”
Of course this is unassailably accurate. All jobs have elements of pure and utter boredom. But how much is tolerable? I have wanted to have this so much, the license to ask someone at the highest boredom threshold: how much boredom should a job bring?
Inside the truck, however, this line of questioning is being gently sucked away by the hum and the slowness. It’s strangely relaxing in here, I say, stifling a long yawn. Do you find meditative?
“Meditative,” he repeats, giving me the side eye, “No. Usually I have the radio on.” And I notice that the radio is indeed illuminated and set to Q104 but turned all the way down.
What about working nights? How awful is it?
Enzo says he doesn’t have any trouble sleeping during the day. He’s tired when he comes home.
“It has its benefits,” he says of the night shift. “I have an elderly parent, so it helps with taking her to doctor's appointments and stuff.”
What do you think about, I prod, all night, out here, doing this? I find myself wanting him to say he thinks about quitting. That he imagines in elaborate detail a totally new or at least moderately different life. He says the opposite. He says he barely has time to think.
“The night flies by. It’s almost like a race to get it all done. You go to and from the dump site, you have to go get water, you wash the screens out, you meet the guys for break time, you go do the same thing again and then it’s time to go home.”
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen? I ask, changing tactics. Enzo pauses for a long moment then tells me how one night he was chased down by former city councilor Dawn Sloane with a cleaning directive he politely refused.
“Like in her nightie?” I say, incredulous, picturing fluffy heeled slippers, a diaphanous chiffon robe billowing behind her, the cinematic orange glow of incandescent streetlight on her strained face.
“I wouldn’t say nightie,” Enzo replies, before jamming the sweeper into Stop Mode and jumping down out of the truck with surprising grace given his size to move a garbage can lid off the street and onto the sidewalk, a motion he’ll repeat many times in the course of a night.
In winter Enzo drives a snow plow. He likes alternating between both. He doesn’t mind anything, except being questioned by randos and being accused of not sweeping streets. He does his job. He’s been doing his job for thirty years.
Enzo drops me off at my building and I say hey, that wasn’t so bad, was it? He almost smiles and shakes his head. He waits until I am safely inside before sweeping away.
*
In 1930, the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote what is now an over-quoted and yet reliably heart-sickening essay titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” wherein he looks ahead one hundred years to imagine how technology will liberate humans from the drudgery of work. He predicted a society with increased leisure time, allowing people to be more fully human.
“We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” Keynes declared, adding that “…avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable.”
Keynes thought the concept of working and saving was a bourgeois neurosis and he believed that by now, close to now, we would have come up with some other way of structuring our lives.
But we haven’t. He was wrong; horribly so.
There has been no work revolution. The most progress we’ve made in recent years is the option to perform work at home in pyjama pants.
Working from home reminds me of house arrest: it may be more comfortable but it’s still confinement. Your freedom is still severely restricted. Being in your home or in a Second Cup, tethered to the phone and/or computer is not freedom, and to mistake it as such perhaps proves how far we really are from restructuring our lives to make room for the kind of leisure pursuits which enrich us personally and move society forward as a whole.
