Remember real dustbin men

[stevie-p]

Does anyone remember when dustbin men were real men?They would walk down your path grab the heavy metal bin,throw it on their back and carry it to the cart and empty it in one move..Whats happened!!!....now they wont tale it unless you put it at the top of your path yourself,they wont take it if its too heavy to roll it to the lift,or if its too full,and they have the right to block the entire street and make you wait to get past them at rush hour...YES ITS MONDAY AND IM HAVING A MOAN!!!

[VINNY100_2]

Blimey..you still got dustbins...!!before wheely bins we had black bags that we had to cover,otherwise the seagulls would tear them apart.Would you really fancy there job,working in all weathers for a pittance.stevie...(:)

[stevie-p]

i think you will find its not quite a pittance anymore.

[laurence2]

The standards now are very poor at best, they drag the plastic bags along the street, which in turn split open, and do they pick the rubbish up {NO}.

Its all about getting finished early, the pay apparently is not that bad tho, but this should not have no bearing on the quality of service, its just another case of the drop in standards now

[ronnie963]

i remember my mum used to give them a christmas tip, now she wouldn't even give them a kick up the ar*e

does anybody still tip their bin men?

[Fat Boy]

Yeah, I remember 'em. Used to make a load of f**king noise at 5 in the morning, drop sh!te all over our street & leave the bins dumped at the verge and the lids somewhere else.

Ah, the good old days.

[gazzawazza]

I'm standing up for our bimnen. Since working practice changes a few years ago they never work job-and-knock, instead they work longer hours in all weathers and very rarely drop anything on the road. (They even have a brush and shovel in case they do.) On the other point, how could they ever finish their job if they had to move every time an ungrateful bin-filling driver appeared?!

Laurence, don't you have wheelie-bins yet, I thought that by now everywhere in the country would have had them?

I remember before we got them everybody was against them but since we've had them I've never heard anyone complain about them. They take so much more rubbish than you would expect and unless you're a little old lady living at the bottom of a flight of steps are easy to take out.

Lobby your councillors now! By the way, we've had them for about ten years now.

[flip-flop]

The thing that annoys me is that in my area we now operate a green wheelie bin (for household rubbish) and a brown bin for garden rubbish which they collect on alternate weeks.

Therefore, and despite the spin that our council puts on this situation, they have basically halved the collection service as I don't have any garden waste in the winter and neither do any of my neighbours.

As a result of the halving of the collection of the green wheelie bin, I now find myself in the position, depite all the recycling I do, of having to make a run to the local dump with a boot full of black bags - how is that right when I spend over �2k a year on council tax?

As is usual in situations where a service is cut-back the council have doggedly insisted it is an improvement - Do they really think us householders are so stupid that we'd believe rubbish like this if they say it enough.

I wonder if I'll get a pro-rata reduction in my council tax for the Winter months? Yeh, right.

[Fat Boy]

Just in case it wasn't obvious from my post, that's how our bin men used to be...

[stevie-p]

the bin men stop opposite me for a free cup of tea off one of the residents...you want to see the stuff they are happy to take from there!!!!....anything,bricks, plaster,tree cuttings,you name it they will take it...BUT,if you dont give them free tea,god help you if you put something unacceptable accidenly in the bin,because not only will they refuse to take it,they totally miss your bin and leave it full.!!!!!! Funny thing though,coming up to xmas they are quite happy to do the opposite!!!!!

[laurence2]

Gazza, i do have wheelie bins, but you have to take the bags from the bins and place them on the pavement outside your house, The problem arises when before the dust cart comes around one of the binmen puts the bags into piles ie every ten or so houses, they drag the bags along the pavements rather than carry them to the said piles, hence the bags splitting.

[Kay]

Im sticking up for our refuse collectors too! We dont have wheelie bins as yet but our binmen do a great job. They pick up any litter from split bags,are polite and friendly. Must admit they dont work for a pittance,they're on very good money these days:-))

[gary baldy]

Always had a teddy strapped to the radiator grill aswell.
Probably against health and safety to do that now.

[joko]

i'll tell you what happened to all the 'old style' bin men - they are all in wheelchairs or hobblibg with zimmerframes or walking sticks and are crippled with back pain and arthritis and rheumatism.

thats why they don't want to lift heavy bins

[tanzanya]

my dustbin men all look like they've been excused from prison for outside work. they're always bursting down the paths, arguing with eachother about something incomprehensible with fags dangling from their mouths. fascinating stuff, i've almost been tempted to ask them what they're in for.

[gazzawazza]

That's just stupid laurence, I thought the whole point of wheelie bins was to prevent the "plaggy-bag" situation. It sounds like your council haven't really thought it through and therefore haven't got the refuse wagons fitted with wheelie-bin lifters. We just put our wheelie bins at the edge of our property on the morning and they just do the rest, wheeling them to the wagon and returning them afterwards.

Flip-flop, we too have that system but I haven't found it to be a problem. Do you live in Redcar and Cleveland Council area by any chance? (Second highest council tax in the UK) which is where I am.

[patc7641]

I work in a jobcentre and last year our council advertised a vacancy for a binman. They had over 600 applicants, they had to close the vacancy down it was that popular, not like the old days, it is now up their with being a lawyer or a doctor. They are on decent money for a stress free, though physically demanding job.

[robbo82]

gazzawazza, we don't have wheelie bins where I live in Birmingham, and my Mum doesn't have one in kent either. We still have to resort to the good-old fashioned method of leaving the black bags out in front of the house on the morning of collection, although there's always a few who put them out the night before, in which case the bags get attacked by rats/foxes/dogs and the rubbish gets strewn all over the pavement.

[waimarie]

Considering our council (NELC) is officially one of the most underperforming and slagged off in the country, we are extremely well served with refuse collection.

We have a green wheelie bin collected weekly, a brown bin for garden refuse collected every other week (scaled down in winter months, separate coloured containers for glass, paper, tins and plastic collected on the alternative week to garden bin throughout the year.

No complaints, I reckon they do a great job.

[Lollyhoney]

There's not enough money in the world to get me to do their job!!

[Fat Boy]

laurence - how do you get the bag out from the bottom of your wheelie bin? The bins I've always used are too deep to just lean over & pull a bag out. What on earth do the old biddies do?