It's a dirty job
It's a dirty job
If the cubicle life isn’t for you and you don’t mind getting knee-deep in stuff that most people spend their lives avoiding, a dirty job might be your thing.
“It’s a lot nicer here than at the landfill,” says Steve Subotnik, supervisor of Greensboro’s Solid Waste Transfer Station on Burnt Poplar Road. “We would get knee-deep mud out there. It’s only a quarter-inch deep here.”
“Dirty Jobs” is more than just a hit TV show on the Discovery Channel. It’s also a day-to-day reality for plenty of people in the Triad, including Subotnik, wildlife wrangler Mike Carter and construction worker Danny Smith.
In fact, all three men recount days working in muck — or worse. Smith spent a couple of days recently removing mud from the crawl space of a house he’s helping to restore on Cypress Street in the historic Aycock neighborhood in Greensboro.
“We had like a river going under the house,” he says. “It was just like a lake going through there. We had to get up under there and dig that muck out. We were on our knees with shovels. You just do it a bucket at a time.”
Carter may have Smith and Subotnik beat, though. He opened Critter Control in Kernersville in 1993, and earlier this decade found himself in a Reidsville church attic full of bat guano — also known as feces.
“Some areas were almost waist-deep,” Carter says. “I guess nobody had been up in the attic in many years, and just didn’t know what was going on.”
The cleanup of that potentially dangerous area required shovels, protective white suits, face masks, shop vacuums and trash bins.
“There were thousands of bats,” Carter says. “They’d been up there so long the guano was a health hazard.”
But you don’t have to work for Critter Control to encounter wildlife on the job. Smith has run into plenty of spiders, garter snakes and even a group of mummified squirrels that got trapped above a porch during a previous repair job. And Subotnik has seen it all at the transfer station, a building the size of an airplane hangar where area garbage gets sorted and processed for an 80-mile drive to a landfill in Montgomery County.
“We see rats, raccoons, possums — even a woodchuck,” Subotnik says. “I don’t know how it got in the garbage.”
Not to mention roadkill. The transfer station gets between two and six deer carcasses every day, he says.
Subotnik, 56, lives in Stokesdale. He moved to the Triad in 1970 from his native Ohio, where his uncle worked at a landfill. “I guess it’s in the blood,” he says. Subotnik started working for the city in 1989 as a mechanic at the landfill, and then worked his way up to operator and supervisor.
The transfer station, which opened in 2006, processes more than 1,000 tons of garbage a day. Inside it reeks of rotting food and other offensive odors. The noise is relentless from an endless parade of garbage trucks dumping their loads on the wet concrete slab. Backhoes and side loaders shove and pack the trash into trailers parked in pits a level below.
“We’re here till the last trailer’s full and the floors are washed,” Subotnik says. After awhile you get used to the smell and noise, he says.
While Smith doesn’t mind the day-to-day mess of construction work, he’s in no hurry to work on more burned-out buildings. He has cleaned out several in downtown Greensboro.
“You go in there and you come out black,” he says. “We had to shore it up and take all the burn out. You put a suit on and you still get covered. It doesn’t seem like it comes off of you for about a month. It sticks to you like glue.”
Smith, 47, has been doing construction work since he was 14. For most of the past year the Greensboro native has worked with Andy Ware and Bill Pixley to renovate the house Pixley owns on Cypress Street. That job has involved clearing thick vegetation and installing drains in the backyard, repairing the house’s foundation, hanging wallboard, pulling off old siding, removing old sewer pipes, pouring concrete to shore up the foundation, and other dirty duties.
The worst part for Smith is when the work requires him to crawl around dark corners under the house: “It gets a little spooky under there!” he says.
For his part, Carter isn’t too fond of playing Santa Claus.
“Yesterday I had a job where something was dead in the chimney — a dead squirrel,” he says. “You have to kind of crawl up the chimney and reach around. The maggots and stuff come down.”
But Carter, 43, also gets to spend plenty of time working with live animals, something he wanted to do most of his life. The Kernersville resident grew up in the Goldsboro area and opened the local Critter Control franchise 15 years ago this month after finishing military service. He spotted an ad in a wildlife magazine recruiting for the franchise.
“I was always interested in animals and things,” he says. “I actually found out about Critter Control when I was getting out of the Navy.”
Summer is the busiest time of year in his line of work: “You’ve got more critters running around then. Snakes are out and about.”
Job calls range in magnitude. Some days they’re as mundane as the dead squirrel in the chimney; others they’re as formidable as removing waist-deep bat guano from a church attic or running a flock of pigeons out of a warehouse.
“From something real small like a bird in a dryer vent to something real large, where you’re netting and securing thousands of square feet of an industrial complex,” Carter says.
Do you get dirty doing your daily grind? Know someone who has a dirty job? We’d like to hear from you for a future follow-up story. Contact Patrick Collins by calling 412-5935 or by e-mailing pcollins@news-record.com.
