Compactor Repair Stories - From The Field! Part 1

No one raised their hand in school (to my knowledge) and announced "When I grow up, I want to repair compactors!" For that matter I didn't raise mine to say I wanted to sell dumpster parts, but heck, things happen.

As the New Year begins, I think about the often-thankless jobs done in the waste industry, to keep commerce and life moving as normal as possible.?

If Commercial Waste was a football team, the Compactor Repair Guy is the Kicker. While he can sit on the bench for 59 minutes of the game, when he is on, oh he is on!?If he misses, he is noticed, if he makes it, achieved is a fleeting second of glory. The guys I talk to often do it all..repairs, clean outs, drive the truck, customer PR. They are unsung Ambassadors of the Waste Industry!

Do you want to watch a waste stream of a business grind to a halt??Have your compactor go down! Need to get it fixed? Well, lots of guys can weld, troubleshoot a truck, etc., but getting the behemoth to fire up again, you are an Artist! Over time, as I have met with this unique bunch on site visits it is so apparent that they have a certain grit and experience to them that is energizing.

The nature of the waste industry lends itself to early risers, but these guys really have no starting time. Often, they sleep with their phone on their nightstand, never knowing when an error code will cause their phone to ring, with a client needing their help in the wee hours of the morning.

You want to scrape “gunk” out of a compactor in freezing cold or rancid heat? You want to be the uniform services least favorite clothes stack to pick up, or have to bag your clothes up before you walk in the house??Sign up here.

All this got me to thinking. The Compactor Repair Guy has got to see some weird stuff going down.?I wonder would learn by asking the simple question “I bet you have a story or two, don’t you?”?Let’s say I got enough back so far where this is going to be Chapter One.

Not one of the Compactor Repair Guys I spoke with went to school or into the industry with the specific plan to do this trade, they all kind of just transitioned to it, and many never went back to container repair, fleet maintenance, welding etc. I would love to have a roundtable meeting of these guys, the tricks of the trade and stories they could exchange...(now there's an idea). Many of them get so good at it they open up their own business, but that usually means the lure of the repair is still there, and they are out on a truck, ready to do a fix!

From my guy Felix at United in CT…. “I’m a bad story teller but here’s a few... Once I was chased out from behind the Ram of a Compactor at K-Mart by a pack of river rats! They were the size of cats! I just wanted to replace a bad limit switch, that’s all...LOL. Man, I couldn’t crawl backwards fast enough! The back-room workers were all laughing. They said they were proud of their rats and that they’re so big because they throw away so much dog-food. LOL ..."

Felix continued "Another time, I encountered a sizable snake while performing a clean out at the Home Depot, again, this was behind the Ram of Stationary Compactor. When clearing out broken wood debris by hand one doesn’t normally expect to find a snake slithering by ‘em!! YIKES!!!"

My good friend Eric at Jackson Compaction confided in me a couple of stories after first claiming “nothing really ever happens.”?After a repair, he dropped a receiver box off only to return in a few days to find a couple had decided to use it as their new residence. This included a kitchen set up, bed and basic amenities. Eric got the authorities to move them along. One thing they didn’t have in the box was a proper bathroom, so they would just use the far end of the container as the commode.??Not a pleasant cleanout for Eric.

?Another Repair Guy told me the story of his company repossessing a compactor on a Mid West August Friday for lack of payment.?The unit was left in the yard to be worked on Monday.?The crew came back to the rancid, choking smell of the contents, discarded hot dogs cooked and rotting in the summer sun.?Worse yet, the Compactor Repair Guys job was to clean it out, of course!

Then there was the Compactor story Eric told me about the dead body getting dumped at the landfill.?The driver went to tip the receiver box and out came a partial skeleton!?The head was removed.?Soon the landfill was a crime scene.?Up went the yellow tape!?You can imagine the thoughts of what has precipitated this crime, this will be front page news etc. Forensics came out and soon the yellow tape came down.?There were even a few chuckles.?It turns out it was a bear skeleton dumped by a hunter.?Paws and bones of a bear and a human can be very similar, hence the mistaken identity, and highlights of that driver’s day! I will save you the Professor Google: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/written-bone/skeleton-keys/human-or-non-human

More stories to come, and it will be good to hear from the Compactor Repair Guys in the Waste Parts Nation who have a story to tell for chapter two!?For that matter, drivers, container repair teams, anybody with a good one, pass it along! Email Gary at?garyc@wastepartsnation?with your memorable story!