Eating humble pie

Here's a job that tops the list of careers you use to tell your children why they should stay in school: garbage collector in Bangkok. I encountered the collector for my street tonight, at midnight, on my stroll home.

He was wearing dark overalls, and a plastic shower cap. He was standing behind the garbage truck, which looks just like the ones we have in the States. He stood there, tearing open all the garbage bags he just loaded on, sorting the trash, separating out the only one item the Thais recycle- plastic bottles- into a sack that hung next to him off the frame of the truck, and god knows what else he is separating. It looked like he was creating two other separate piles.

I looked at my trash very differently once I got home.